You can now use up to five physical shards on your vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB clusters. An increased number of shards in a cluster enables you to host larger workloads and get elevated performance through higher concurrency.
When you create a vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB cluster, you can select from one to five shards. As before, each physical shard gets the same compute (vCore count and amount of RAM) and storage (GiB and IOPS) configuration.
Using a greater number of physical shards can also help increase cluster performance for larger workloads that require multishard clusters because of better parallelization.