AWS' RDS docs on multi-master Aurora state the following:
In an Aurora multi-master cluster, each shard is managed by a specific DB instance, and a DB instance can be responsible for multiple shards.
Later in the same document, we read:
You can avoid resharding operations because all DB instances in a cluster can access all databases and tables through the shared storage volume.
So, a multi-master Aurora instance can be responsible for multiple shards. This is made possible in part because all DB instances access the same shared storage volume.
If multi-master Aurora instances can manage multiple shards, what's the advantage of using sharding at all? Why not just configure all instances to manage all shards? (Essentially obviating the need for sharding)
A theory
My suspicion is that not using sharding would lead to more deadlocks within Aurora's internals if different masters write to the same page at the same time. This, in turn, would lead to increased latency while Aurora retries the contentious write. Or, perhaps Aurora would generate an error and the application itself would have to retry the query. (I'm clearly not familiar enough with Aurora to know what happens, hence this question 😁)