DesignPatterns Architecture
Post #8284 · source on Telegram
Three Engineers and a Database for Safe UUIDs
Description
A Hacker News comment screenshot on the thread "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..." from user thisisfunny_1982, 72 days ago, with parent/context/prev/next navigation. The comment is a war story: a friend joined a ~200-dev high-growth startup as CTO and found a dedicated UUID-generation microservice—one endpoint, a team of three including a database engineer. Other teams had to call it for a 'safe' UUID. The service generated a UUID, checked it against a private database of every previously issued ID, inserted it, then returned it. The punchline: the team had its own kanban board and sprints. It satirizes cargo-cult microservices and refusing to trust 122 bits of UUID v4 randomness.
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A dedicated UUID uniqueness service is just uuid4() with on-call, a kanban board, and a growing table of proof they don't trust 122 bits of entropy.