A data service may be distributed over a set of servers in order to provide a database with properties such as low latency, high availability, and support for various consistency levels. Presented herein is a particular architecture that promotes rapid provisioning to promote scalability and failover; adaptive load-balancing to accommodate fluctuations in demand; and resiliency in the event of various types of failure, such as network partitions or regional outages. For a service comprising a resource set, a container is provided that hosts a set of replicas of a partition, and that is assigned an allocation of computing capabilities of one or more servers. The resource set of the service may be distributed over the replicas of the container. Scalability is achieved by adding replicas to the container, and load-balancing may be provided by splitting, merging, or otherwise refactoring the partition to accommodate anticipated and unanticipated fluctuations in service demand.