A phone book is a great analogy?

If you want someone in Berlin, you'd look in a Berlin phonebook; if you want someone in Austin, you'd look in an Austin phonebook. Maybe the underlying storage mechanism doesn't rely on consistent hashing or buckets, but phone books are inherently distributed key/value stores.

Phone books also have non-phone information on some entries, but their primary purpose is to get phone numbers. The analogy is fine.

I can go to nearly any house and pick up a phone book and get the equivalent of A records (name to address).

A distributed IP book then?