How does Milvus handle sharding?

Milvus splits each collection into logical partitions and physical shards. Partitions are user-defined logical groupings useful for filtering subsets like per-tenant or per-date data. Shards are physical divisions that distribute data across worker nodes for parallel processing, with the shard count set at collection creation. Queries can target specific partitions to reduce the search space, while the shard layer handles parallelization transparently. This two-level model lets users organize data logically while leaving physical distribution to Milvus.