A data service-- which has:
- schema enforcement
- replication
- geo-distribution / load-balancing
- caching (MUCH later ;) )
- archiving / deleting data
- security
- backups
The intention is to have a stack of "backend stores" that this unified API can talk with to store the actual data. As such a lot of the features (schema, sharding, etc.) are done independently of the underlying store.