Comment by eru

Have a look at rendezvous hashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing). It's simpler, and more general than 'consistent hashing'. Eg you don't have to muck around with virtual nodes. Everything just works out, even for small numbers of targets.

It's also easier to come up with an exact weighted version of rendezvous hashing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing#Weighted_re... for the weighted variant.

Faintly related: if you are into load balancing, you might also want to look into the 'power of 2 choices'. See eg https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/mythesis.... or this HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37143376

The basic idea is that you can vastly improve on random assignment for load balancing by instead picking two servers at random, and assigning to the less loaded one.

It's an interesting topic in itself, but there's also ways to combine it with consistent hashing / rendezvous hashing.