Ticket Server

Ticket servers are another interesting way to generate unique IDs. Flicker developed ticket servers to generate distributed primary keys. It is worth mentioning how the system works.

The idea is to use a centralized auto_increment feature in a single database server (Ticket Server). To learn more about this, refer to flicker’s engineering blog article.

Pros:

• Numeric IDs.

• It is easy to implement, and it works for small to medium-scale applications.

Cons:

• Single point of failure. Single ticket server means if the ticket server goes down, all systems that depend on it will face issues. To avoid a single point of failure, we can set up multiple ticket servers. However, this will introduce new challenges such as data synchronization.