Distributed Systems

Consistent Hashing for Distributed Systems Many distributed systems need a deterministic answer to a simple question: given a key, which node should own it? A stateless load balancer can choose the least-loaded backend for every request. A cache, shard map, or stateful service cannot. Sending the same key to different nodes destroys locality, while moving too many keys during a resize can overload storage and downstream databases. Consistent hashing is a family of techniques for balancing four goals: ...