Webscale is all about sharding and its coming to SQL Azure
There are many that joke about developers always talking about webscale and needing to shard to be able to scale. In reality many systems, if not most, don’t need to be able to scale to numerous nodes because todays processing is so powerful. However in the cloud world where you don’t have 1 big box you have many little ones (instances) you need some way of sharding/federating/distributing data and load.
I’ve mentioned before of a PDC presentation on whats coming in SQL Azure, well they’ve put some more content out there including details on how to shard with the current Azure infrastructure.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/12/23/10108670.aspx
The new stuff looks real neat and easy to use, but just because its not easy at the moment doesn’t mean its not possible, you just have to work at it.