How does ScyllaDB's shard-aware driver route requests?

A shard-aware driver understands not just which node owns a given partition key, via the same token-ring logic every driver uses, but which specific CPU shard on that node owns it, since ScyllaDB partitions data by core within a node as well as across nodes.

Normal (non-shard-aware) drivers connect to a node and let ScyllaDB internally forward the request to the correct shard, adding a small extra hop inside the node. A shard-aware driver instead opens multiple connections per node, one (or more) per shard, and computes the target shard client-side from the partition key's token before sending the request, so it connects directly to the connection already bound to the owning shard. This removes the internal cross-shard forwarding step entirely, which measurably reduces latency and CPU overhead at high request rates, making shard-aware drivers the recommended choice for latency-sensitive ScyllaDB workloads.

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