Yeah; usually sharding implies some form of state or data storage that's split up across machines. If the same state is held on multiple machines it's called "mirroring"; if different state is held on different machines (and there's some function to determine which machine you need to talk to), it's "sharding". Load balancing encompasses both of these strategies, as well as the trivial cases where you have either stateless computations or read-only state that can be replicated.
Load balancing is just a subset of sharding though. It's how you shard your incoming traffic. The same strategies generally apply to both, but you get more leeway with traffic if it's stateless.
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Sounds more like load balancing than sharding.
Yeah; usually sharding implies some form of state or data storage that's split up across machines. If the same state is held on multiple machines it's called "mirroring"; if different state is held on different machines (and there's some function to determine which machine you need to talk to), it's "sharding". Load balancing encompasses both of these strategies, as well as the trivial cases where you have either stateless computations or read-only state that can be replicated.
Load balancing is just a subset of sharding though. It's how you shard your incoming traffic. The same strategies generally apply to both, but you get more leeway with traffic if it's stateless.