Pax Dei looks dope:
Their wiki has a Tech section:
Tech | Pax Dei - Social Sandbox MMO
They have a section on Sharding and servers and stuff:
We estimate we’ll start with a maximum population in a single shard of around 7,000 players. A single shard is run wholly within one physical cloud hosting center. We will run shards in different availability regions worldwide, e.g., North America and Europe.
Here’s a fun thought exercise: How would I approach the infrastructure requirements for this game if I was in charge of doing just that?
I have no affiliation or inside knowledge with Pax Dei, it’s just fun to think about.
<aside> 💡
</aside>
Need to scale synchronous multiplayer servers to max load of 7k concurrent users.
Its probably rare that you get 7k concurrent users. Closest you get is on launch day, when you server code is its least hardened. Aaaand probably hit hardest.