- This article describes the Pastry Distributed Hash Table. For the food, see Pastry.
Pastry is an
overlay and routing network for the implementation of a
distributed hash table (DHT) similar to
Chord. The
key-value pairs are stored in a redundant
peer-to-peer network of connected
Internet hosts. The protocol is
bootstrapped by supplying it with the
IP address of a peer already in the network and from then on via the routing table which is dynamically built and repaired. Because of its redundant and decentralized nature there is no
single point of failure and any single node can leave the network at any time without warning and with little or no chance of data loss. The protocol is also capable of using a routing metric supplied by an outside program, such as
ping or
traceroute, to determine the best routes to store in its routing table.