Partitioning

Consistent Hashing: Limit Key Movement as Nodes Change

Distributed systems often need a deterministic answer to a simple question: given a key, which node should own it? A cache cluster may route each object key to one server. A storage service may assign each partition to a shard. A worker pool may send all events for the same account to the same processor. The routing rule must be stable enough that clients agree, yet flexible enough to handle nodes joining and leaving.