Assess students' ability to design and implement consistent hashing schemes for scalable distributed key‑value stores. Tasks include choosing and justifying hash functions, comparing ring-based and rendezvous approaches, specifying virtual-node/replica strategies to reduce imbalance and data redistribution on node join/leave, defining membership-change and failure-recovery protocols, analyzing expected load distribution and complexity, and outlining implementation details (data migration, partitioning, namespace hashing, and testing). Expect applied problem-solving with pseudocode, diagrams, and quantitative trade-off evaluation.