Building an IRC App on MongoDB: Build a Scalable Message Logging Service and Then Shard It - Live!

We will extend the IRC server to log the full chat history. This requires a scalable backend to store an infinitely growing volume of messages. We'll look at several ways of designing the message storage and the limitations and tradeoffs of each. We will then deploy our updated IRC server and upgrade from a replica set to a sharded cluster without any downtime. Give us your feedback and win some swag!