Ilya Brin - Software Engineer

History is written by its contributors
For a long time, almost nobody was listening to us computer scientists. Now I worry maybe too many people are listening to us and they think we know more than we do.
Donald Ervin Knuth

Consistent Hashing: The Math Behind Load Balancing

Hey there! 👋

Imagine: you have 1000 servers and millions of requests. How do you distribute load evenly so that adding a new server doesn’t require rehashing everything?

Regular hash(key) % servers becomes a disaster when scaling. Add one server and 90% of data needs to be moved!

But there’s an elegant solution: Consistent Hashing. The mathematics that saves you from chaos in distributed systems.

Let’s dive into the algorithm used by Amazon DynamoDB, Cassandra, and Redis Cluster 🚀

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