This document discusses MongoDB sharding which involves horizontally scaling MongoDB across multiple machines or shards. It describes the components of a sharded MongoDB cluster including shards, config servers, and mongos query routers. It provides examples of when and why sharding would be used such as for large datasets, high throughput, hardware limitations, storage engine limitations, isolating failures, and separating hot and cold data. The document then outlines steps to set up a basic two node sharded cluster with one shard, three config servers, and mongos query routers on the same two machines.