We’ve delegated ID creation to each table inside each shard, by using PL/PGSQL, Postgres’ internal programming language, and Postgres’ existing auto-increment functionality.

Each of our IDs consists of:

• 41 bits for time in milliseconds (gives us 41 years of IDs with a custom epoch)
• 13 bits that represent the logical shard ID
• 10 bits that represent an auto-incrementing sequence, modulus 1024. This means we can generate 1024 IDs, per shard, per millisecond