This is one of those algorithms that, once you understand the fundamental concepts, opens up so many doors for you in systems-level thinking. Great tool to have

This is one of those algorithms that, once you understand the fundamental concepts, opens up so many doors for you in systems-level thinking. Great tool to have, portable, and relatively easy to implement. I recently had to figure out a short-term way of horizontally scaling a graphite service. I didn't really like the stateful complexity around the carbon relay-based solution, so I decided to build a simple orchestration layer in node that routes statsd metrics to graphite nodes using consistent hashing. Given the use cases for that particular service, I didn't have to worry about long term data storage so I could hand wave some of the pain points in cluster membership changes. A simple keyspace-aware rsync daemon was enough to get the job done.