Holy god. The post mentions "We evaluated a few different NoSQL solutions, but (...)".

I couldn't even imagine having to _think_ about this sort of thing; CouchDB makes this an absolute no-brainer. I mean, the act of creating a document assigns it a UUID in the database _by_ _default_.

Or, do you want to fetch a UUID before assigning it to any data? localhost:5984/_uuids Want to fetch 10? localhost:5984/_uuids?count=10 Want to fetch a million? localhost:5984/_uuids?count=1000000

Instagram seems like the absolutely perfect candidate for CouchDB -- unstructured data, speed, HTTP querying, big data, attachments...