Hi Peter, as the blog post talks about, our distributed hypertables typically partition by both time _and_ "space" (i.e., some other column like device id, etc.) as a way to better parallelize I/O (reads & writes) for the "current" time. That is, each time slice is typically spread across all nodes that existed when the time interval was opened. So this greatly ameliorates the interesting "time" problem you mention.

Now, if this time/space partitioning alone isn't sufficient (i.e., demand for a single device/userid/etc at a specific time overcomes the read capacity of K nodes), having time-series data being primarily insert heavy (or even immutable) also gives us a lot of flexibility about how we replicate (as a sibling comment also suggested). And what really helps is that, by design, the architecture we built tracks fine-grained chunk information (rather than just course-grained hash-partitions), which can enable dynamic replication of individual chunks. More on this to come.