7 Famous Approaches to Generate Distributed ID with Comparison Table

Nowadays, many small and large systems require unique global identifiers; it is an essential task in distributed computing with growing internet usage and high dependencies on different applications.

Before jumping directly to Distributed ID Generation approach, Let’s first understand the traditional or current approach or Non-Distributed Approach:

Traditional Approach (Non-Distributed System)

Approach 1: An ID generator uses a shared counter that increases at each call.

Traditional Approach

So the above approach works. And even today, Most of the applications are still using this approach.

Approach 2, Another native solution is to generate an ID as a timestamp function. But those are bad solutions because there are the following existing problems.

• Multiple independent servers can generate the same ID.
• The same ID generates for two consecutive requests.

So why do we need a complex system to generate Record / Row ID?

It is often necessary to uniquely identify many data and messages in complex distributed systems. For example, in finance, payment, catering, hotel, cat’s eye…