Software Engineering
20 Sep 2026
6 min read
Rendezvous Hashing Keeps Key Placement Stable as Nodes Change
Rendezvous Hashing Keeps Key Placement Stable as Nodes Change Distributed systems often need a deterministic answer to a placement question: given a key and a current set of nodes, which node owns the key? A simple modulo rule such as hash(key) % N is compact, but changing N can move a large fraction of keys at once. Rendezvous hashing, also called highest-random-weight hashing, uses a different rule. For each key, it computes a deterministic score for every eligible node and selects the node with the highest score. Adding or removing a node changes placement only for keys whose ranking is affected by that membership change.