How does MongoDB scale?

Scalability is becoming increasingly important in today's data driven world. How can MongoDB help? This tutorial will provide a solid grounding in how Sharding in MongoDB allows for horizontal scale, as well as providing enough practical information to start, use, and maintain a Sharded cluster in MongoDB.

The format of the tutorial will alternate between the theory and the practice.

MongoDB's data model: Eliminating data dependencies and parallelism
MongoDB sharding basics: How is the data stored and accessed from the application?
MongoDB cluster setup: Set up your first sharded cluster
MongoDB sharding internals: How does the routing work? How is the cluster balanced?
MongoDB sharding administration: Backup and Maintenance

I studied Operating Systems as an undergraduate and masters student at Brown University. After graduating in 2012, I started work as a software engineer at 10gen, The MongoDB Company. I am very passionate about education and about systems topics in particular, so during college I was a Teaching Assistant for Brown's Introduction to Computer Systems and Operating Systems classes. This has carried over to my time at 10gen in the form of involvement in the open source and database communities (and a few others around specific languages people are using with MongoDB). I've done talks at some of our MongoDB days, talks at Meetup groups, and a joint talk with Joyent at Scale 11x. I'm looking forward to sharing what I know with anyone who is interested, while continuing to learn a lot along the way.