Description
The hash function is the veritable hammer for pounding a large array of engineering problems into submission. Want to shard your database? Draw a key from your data, hash it, and voila, instant deterministic load balancing! That’s simple enough, until you look more carefully at distributional effects, failure, and redundancy management. We’ll review well known (consistent hashing), not so well known (rendezvous hashing), and recent (shuffle sharding, copysets) work that goes a long way towards engineering more favorable failure scenarios.