There may be a misunderstanding here about sharding vs replication. Having the same data distributed across a few data centers for data locality is done using r

There may be a misunderstanding here about sharding vs replication. Having the same data distributed across a few data centers for data locality is done using replication. Sharding means that data is partitioned horizontally to achieve higher throughput, or other goals. See here for a good discussion: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11571273/in-mongo-what-is-the-difference-between-sharding-and-replication https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11571273/in-mongo-what-i... MongoDB's multi-document transactions work with replication today, and will work with sharding in 4.2.