A consistent hash ring is a similar concept, I think. We're quickly approaching the out-of-my-depth line, though.
It's about maintaining the property that you can route information from many different places and have that information end in a consistent place, no matter where it's sent from. And, assuming the consistent place doesn't go offline, a large number of servers can fall over without warning before that property is changed. It's about making discovery of nodes in your cluster reliable, and passing information in between them.
The use cases for that are many, and each has their own nuances, which is why this is so confusing and hard to talk about.
Right. It sounds like one of those problems that can be solved in many ways, and a DHT is designed to deal with a specific constraint. Thanks for the details!
It's about maintaining the property that you can route information from many different places and have that information end in a consistent place, no matter where it's sent from. And, assuming the consistent place doesn't go offline, a large number of servers can fall over without warning before that property is changed. It's about making discovery of nodes in your cluster reliable, and passing information in between them.
The use cases for that are many, and each has their own nuances, which is why this is so confusing and hard to talk about.