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This reminds me a little bit of Twitter's snowflake: To generate the roughly-sorted 64 bit ids in an uncoordinated manner, we settled on a composition of: timestamp, worker number and sequence number.

Sequence numbers are per-thread and worker numbers are chosen at startup via zookeeper (though that’s overridable via a config file).

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing...

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Is that still a viable strategy or are there better options available by now? Is Twitter still using Snowflake? (There’s a nice Elon pun in there somewhere, I’m sure)

The initial version, released in 2010, was based on Apache Thrift and it predated Finagle, their building block for RPC services at Twitter. The Snowflake they're using internally is a full rewrite and heavily relies on existing infrastructure at Twitter to run.

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