MongoDb Sharding is a method used to distribute data to multiple machines. Sharding improves data access performance. if you want to install Sharded Cluster you may want to read below article.

“Deploy Sharded Cluster with Keyfile Access Control on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS Linux”

Sharded Cluster Components

Sharding Cluster consists of three main components.

1) Shards

2)Config Servers

3)Routing Instances

Shards in MongoDB

Its a MongoDB instance that stores a part of data from a collection according to a specific rule. Since data is divided into shards, there is an increase in performance because it will only redirect to the relevant shards during access. Shards can be a single mongod instance or they can be defined as replica sets for redundancy purposes.

Config Servers in MongoDB

These are the servers that stores the metadata of the cluster. Configuration servers are also mongod instances.

Routing Instances in MongoDB

These are mongos instances that allow applications to redirect read and write operations to shards. Applications cannot access shards directly. Routing instances are multiplexed on different servers to ensure high availability.