Thanks for attending to the details! You can breakdown the ring to a list of key-value map. The keys will be the range, like "0-1341", "50170-63937". But the point of all those posts is to illustrate the principle of distributed system design, rather than illustrating the details of each existing technology. I didn't say 'store the host membership in some distributed storage system with strong consistency' because that will be dry. Please assume all technical details of my posts being inaccurate, but let me know if you find flaws in design.