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The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing (2011)
The simplicity of consistent hashing is pretty mind-blowing. Here you have a number of nodes in a cluster of databases, or in a cluster of web caches. How do you figure out where the data for a particular key goes in that cluster?
Consistent hashing solves the problem people desperately tried to apply sharding to pretty nicely and elegantly. Instead of picking a random key, a node could choose from a fixed set of partitions, like equally size pizza slices. With that, consistent hashing enables a pretty linear increase in capacity as you add more nodes to a cluster.
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