--- /dev/null
+/*
+ * Copyright (c) 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. and others. All rights reserved.
+ *
+ * This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
+ * terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 which accompanies this distribution,
+ * and is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
+ */
+
+package org.opendaylight.controller.cluster.datastore.shardstrategy;
+
+import org.opendaylight.yangtools.yang.data.api.InstanceIdentifier;
+
+/**
+ * The role of ShardStrategy is to figure out which Shards a given piece of data belongs to
+ */
+public interface ShardStrategy {
+ /**
+ * Find the name of the shard in which the data pointed to by the specified path belongs in
+ *
+ * @param path The location of the data in the logical tree
+ * @return
+ */
+ String findShard(InstanceIdentifier path);
+}