Lately I've been studying Redis a lot. When using key/value databases like Redis, as well as caches like Memcached, if you want to scale keys across multiple nodes, you need a consistent hashing algorithm. Consistent hashing is what we use when we want to distribute a set of keys along a span of key/value servers in a...well consistent fashion.

zzzeek : The Absolutely Simplest Consistent Hashing Example

Lots of good Python tricks in this.