[preillyme]

This reminds me a little bit of Twitter's snowflake: To generate the roughly-sorted 64 bit ids in an uncoordinated manner, we settled on a composition of: timestamp, worker number and sequence number.

Sequence numbers are per-thread and worker numbers are chosen at startup via zookeeper (though that’s overridable via a config file).

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing...

[9dev]

Is that still a viable strategy or are there better options available by now? Is Twitter still using Snowflake? (There’s a nice Elon pun in there somewhere, I’m sure)

[preillyme]

The initial version, released in 2010, was based on Apache Thrift and it predated Finagle, their building block for RPC services at Twitter. The Snowflake they're using internally is a full rewrite and heavily relies on existing infrastructure at Twitter to run.