Today, most data systems are not able to automatically compensate for such a highly skewed workload, so it’s the responsibility of the application to reduce the skew. For example, if one key is known to be very hot, a simple technique is to add a random number to the beginning or end of the key. Just a two-digit decimal random number would split the writes to the key evenly across 100 different keys, allowing those keys to be distributed to different partitions.

