Gregg Donovan presented on lessons learned from sharding Solr at Etsy over three versions: 1) Initially, Etsy did not shard to avoid problems, but the single node approach did not scale. 2) The first sharding version used local sharding across multiple JVMs per host for better latency and manageability. 3) The current version uses distributed sharding across data centers for further latency gains, but this introduced challenges of partial failures, synchronization, and distributed queries.