Once you have chosen your architecture, you need to optimize each component of your system to handle the high volume and velocity of requests. Caching is a technique that stores frequently accessed or expensive data in a fast and temporary storage layer, such as memory or SSD, which can reduce the load on your database, improve the response time, and save bandwidth. Load balancing is a technique that distributes the incoming requests across multiple servers or instances of your system using algorithms such as round-robin, least connections, or hashing, which can improve the performance, availability, and scalability of your system. Sharding is a technique that splits your data into smaller and manageable chunks based on criteria such as key, range, or location; this can increase the throughput, reduce the contention, and enable parallel processing of your data. However, these techniques can also introduce inconsistency and invalidation issues, synchronization and session management challenges, as well as complicate queries, joins, and transactions.