In this post I will not be solving a problem, instead I will be talking about something I learned by reading chapter 7 Design a Unique ID Generator in Distributed Systems in the book System Design Interview by Alex Wu.
The idea of a unique ID is a requirement in most distributed systems. In my case, some years ago I was developing a storage server and needed to name the objects of different types and sizes a client might wish to store and of course, at some later point in time, retrieve. The idea of a file system path did not make sense because it would be nearly impossible to keep the same immutable configuration among many distributed systems with a huge capacity. Continue reading “Design Unique ID Generator in Distributed Systems”