Scope and direction

Clarifications:

• do you mean no collisions at all or to implement collisions?
  • no collisions, globally unique IDs
• any preference on the algorithm?
  • ordering should be roughly time-ordered (Snowflake-ish)
• do the IDs need to be ordered or? eg. by timestamp ^
• what scale are throughput are we expecting?
  • 10-100k IDs per system

Problem re-statement:

We need to design a distributed unique ID generator without collisions with time-ordered IDs and high throughput.

Core constraints:

• global unique IDs without collisions
• high throughput across nodes
• minimal synchronisation overhead

Requirements

Functional Requirements:

• generate unique IDs without collisions and timesorted IDs
• support batch requests

Non-Functional Requirements:

• low latency (p99 < 10 ms per request)
• high throughput (target 10-100k IDs per second)
• high availability (target 99.99%)
• minimal synchronisation on the ID generation path

The hardest NFR is guaranteeing global uniqueness at high throughput without bottleneck.

API Design

Read path - request ID(s)

IDs are returned as strings and the API is stateless.

High-Level Design

Describe the overall system architecture. Identify the main components needed to solve the problem end-to-end. Use the diagramming tool to create a block diagram.

Detailed Component Design

Deep dive into 2-3 key components. Explain how they work, how they scale, discuss tradeoffs, capacity, and any relevant algorithms or data structures.