The Desi Architect
Notes / Interview Foundations / Distributed Unique ID Generation at Scale
Track 1 · Interview Foundations

Distributed Unique ID Generation at Scale

Generating unique, roughly time-sorted 64-bit and 128-bit identifiers at hundreds of thousands of operations per second without a single database bottleneck. Covers Twitter Snowflake bit layouts, NTP clock rollback defenses, and why sequential UUIDv7 prevents catastrophic B+Tree page fragmentation.

Guide17 min read
On this page
  1. The auto-increment bottleneck
  2. Level 1: The intuitive mental model (for everyone)
  3. Level 2: The step-by-step production architecture
  4. Level 3: The Advanced production physics, clock drift, and UUIDv7