Came across distributed hash tables when trying to lookup on key value stores.
A Distributed Hash Table is a structure which supports lookup/resource discovery in large peer-to-peer distributed systems, where storage and lookups are distributed among multiple machines.
It is a building block for peer-to-peer applications.
Peer-to-Peer
It is a distributed system architecture without any centralized control and without the use of centralized services, where the nodes are symmetric in function.
Properties of a DHT
- Decentralized
- Scalable
- Efficient: Find items quickly
- Dynamic: Nodes can fail, new nodes can join
- General-purpose: Flexible naming