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hardSystem Design

How would you design a unique ID generator at scale?

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01

Understand the problem

Design a unique ID generator at scale at scale — requirements, capacity, and trade-offs.

system-designcase-study
02

Attempt it yourself

Sketch your approach before reading the solution — that's what interviews test.

Nudge consolestandby

Stuck? Beam a request up — the console returns a conceptual nudge that guides your logic without spoiling the implementation.

03

Study the solution

Design a Unique ID Generator

Need 64-bit k-sorted 10K/s without coordination per ID.

ApproachHowTrade
Snowflake41b timestamp + 10b shard + 12b seqclock skew needs NTP + sequence reset
Ticket serverMySQL AUTO_INCREMENTSPOF, 2K/s
UUID v4random 122bn

Solution ready — 2 min read

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04

Read the code

Snowflake
Run Playground
import time
EPOCH = 1609459200000
def snowflake(shard_id, seq):
    ts = int(time.time()*1000) - EPOCH
    return (ts << 22) | (shard_id << 12) | seq
05

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