How Do Snowflake‑Style IDs Work (Timestamp, Worker, Sequence), and What Problems Do They Solve?

Grokking Scalable Systems for Interviews

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How Do Snowflake‑Style IDs Work (Timestamp, Worker, Sequence), and What Problems Do They Solve?

Snowflake IDs are distributed, globally unique 64-bit identifiers that combine a timestamp, a machine (worker) ID, and a sequence counter to produce roughly time-ordered IDs.

In other words, each Snowflake ID embeds when (timestamp), where (which server or process), and which (sequence number) it was created, making it unique without a central coordinator.

This format was created by Twitter (X) for tweet IDs and is now used by systems like Discord and Instagram, solving the problem of generating unique identifiers at scale.

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