Apache ShardingSphere’s pluggable architecture is designed to enable developers to customize their own unique systems by adding the desired features, just like adding building blocks.
A plugin-oriented architecture has very high requirements for program architecture design. It requires making each module independent, and using a pluggable kernel to combine various functions in an overlapping manner. Designing an architecture system that completely isolates the feature development not only fosters an active open source community, but also ensures the quality of the project.
Apache ShardingSphere began to focus on the pluggable architecture since version 5.X, and the functional components of the project can be flexibly extended in a pluggable manner. Currently, features such as data sharding, read/write splitting, data encryption, shadow DB stress testing, and support for SQL and protocols such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, Oracle, etc. are woven into the project through plugins. Apache ShardingSphere has provided dozens of SPIs (service provider interfaces) as extension points of the system, with the total number still increasing.
