Sharding Status for Failure Scenarios: API Design with RavenDB

an interesting question came up recently. how do we want to handle sharding failures?

for example, let us say that i have a 3 nodes clusters of ravendb, serving posts for a blog (just to give some random example). the way the sharding has been setup, we are doing sharding using round robin based on posts (so each post goes to a different machine, and anything related to post goes to the same node as the post). here is how it can be set:

now, we want to display the main page, and we would like to show the most recent posts. we can do this using the following code:

the question is, what would happen if the second server if offline?

i’ll give several alternative in the next few posts.