You probably don't need sharding yet.
Every time I see a team reach for it, the real problem is further down the stack. Read replicas for read-heavy load. A missing index on the query that's actually slow. Connection pooling so you stop melting the database with 2,000 idle connections. Partitioning to keep hot tables manageable. And honestly, a bigger box, which goes further than most people believe.
Sharding earns its place only when single-primary write throughput is the hard ceiling and nothing else moves it. That is a real wall, but it is much farther out than the roadmap slide suggests.
The trap is growth projections. They are routinely off by 5 to 10x in both directions. If you shard for traffic you don't have, you pay the operational tax now and might never collect the benefit.
So before the rewrite: what specific number are you hitting, and have you proven it's writes and not everything else?
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