Twitter Open Sources Snowflake, An ID Number Generator

Tired of generating new ideas within a distributed database system for billions of messages? We’re getting tired too! Thankfully, Twittter has open sourced a new product this evening called “Snowflake”, which enables developers to generate new ID numbers, by combining timestamp, worker number, and sequence number, something produced through Apache Zookeeper.

If all this sounds relatively complex, that’s because it is. Twitter is dealing with billions of messages that need to be indexed in a short amount of time.