History
Originally devised by Karger et al. at MIT for use in distributed caching, the idea has now been expanded to other areas also. An academic paper from 1997 introduced the term "consistent hashing" as a way of distributing requests among a changing population of Web servers. Each slot is then represented by a node in a distributed system. The addition (joins) and removal (leaves/failures) of nodes only requires items to be re-shuffled when the number of slots/nodes change.
Consistent hashing has also been used to reduce the impact of partial system failures in large Web applications as to allow for robust caches without incurring the system wide fallout of a failure.
The consistent hashing concept also applies to the design of distributed hash tables (DHTs). DHTs use consistent hashing to partition a keyspace among a distributed set of nodes, and additionally provide an overlay network that connects nodes such that the node responsible for any key can be efficiently located.
Read more about this topic: Consistent Hashing
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