What are TWO functions of sharding?

Sharding is MongoDB ' s horizontal-scaling mechanism: it partitions a collection ' s data across multiple shards so a deployment can scale storage capacity and distribute query or write workload beyond the limits of one server. That directly supports deployments with very large datasets and high-throughput operations, making C correct. MongoDB also supports zone sharding, which associates ranges of shard-key values with selected shards. Zones can be used to keep particular data near a geographical region, satisfy locality requirements, or map data ranges to hardware tiers, so A is also correct. Option B overstates what sharding itself provides; cross-region consistency behavior depends on replication topology, read/write concerns, latency, and application design rather than simply enabling sharding. Option D describes a deployment that already fits comfortably in memory and meets performance goals, so sharding may add unnecessary operational complexity. Option E primarily describes replication: replica sets maintain redundant copies, provide elections, and improve availability. Production shards are themselves normally replica sets, but redundancy is a replication function rather than the defining purpose of sharding. Therefore the two functions represented here are geographic zone distribution and horizontal scale: A and C.

Study Guide reference/topic:Sharding Strategies and Scalable Deployments - horizontal scaling, large datasets, throughput, shard keys, and zone sharding.