US Patent 11030171 Elastic sharding of data in a multi-tenant cloud

In an example embodiment, primary data is received from a first tenant in a computer network. Then auxiliary data relating to the primary data is received from the first tenant. A first index is created for the primary data and the auxiliary data from the first tenant. Then the first index is stored as a first shardlet. The first shardlet is bundled with one or more other shardlets for the tenant in a shard group. The shard group is packed with one or more other shard groups in a first shard. Then the first shard is stored in a first instance of a distributed database, the distributed database comprising a plurality of instances, each instance operating on a different logical or physical device.