Year in Review: UUID Trends and Developments in 2024

UUIDs in 2024: A Year of Modernization and Maturity

UUIDs — those humble 128-bit identifiers — had quite the glow-up in 2024. What began as a quiet spec from decades past is now front-and-center in conversations around system design, data scale, and global uniqueness.

Let’s take a look at what shaped the UUID landscape this past year, from emerging standards and implementation trends to best practices and real-world usage.

🚀 UUIDv7 Gains Momentum

One of the biggest stories in 2024? The rise of UUIDv7.

Drafted as part of the new [RFC 9562](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9562/), UUIDv7 blends timestamp-based generation with randomness, offering the best of both UUIDv1 and UUIDv4:

• Sortable by time
• Resistant to collisions
• Doesn’t leak hardware or IP details

By mid-2024, many libraries across Go, Rust, Java, and JavaScript had added experimental or full support for UUIDv7. Adoption in time-sensitive systems — logs, event stores, analytics — exploded.

Key UUIDv7 Implementations in 2024

• Go: github.com/google/uuid added experimental NewV7()
• JavaScript: uuid v10+ supports v7() natively
• Rust: uuid crate 1.4 includes time-based support

UUIDv7 is becoming the go-to for systems that need sortability with uniqueness, like Kafka keys, OLAP systems, or time-series stores.

🧪 UUIDv8: Custom Structure, Niche Use

UUIDv8, also introduced in the new RFC, allows developers to define their own layout within the 128-bit format — sort of like the wild west of UUIDs.

It saw niche adoption in:

• Blockchain projects: Custom identifiers for timestamped events
• Security-focused APIs: Embedding metadata into ID layout
• Gaming platforms: Session-aware traceable IDs

Most teams treaded cautiously with v8 due to interoperability and tooling issues, but it’s worth watching as specialized tooling improves.

🔍 UUIDs in Observability and Tracing

2024 brought a noticeable trend: UUIDs became first-class citizens in observability stacks.

• OpenTelemetry started recommending UUIDv7 for trace and span IDs
• Grafana Loki introduced support for UUID-sortable labels
• Log aggregation tools now visualize UUID sequences for debugging distributed events

Time-ordered UUIDs make correlation easier, reducing latency in tracing systems and simplifying incident analysis.

🔐 Security and Privacy: Goodbye UUIDv1?

This year also saw a formal deprecation wave for UUIDv1 across many libraries and cloud platforms. While UUIDv1 was useful for time ordering, it included:

• MAC addresses (hardware exposure)
• High traceability
• Predictable sequence patterns

Organizations like GitHub, AWS, and Google Cloud updated internal tooling to prefer v4 or v7.

✅ Best practice going forward:

• Use UUIDv4 for opaque public-facing IDs
• Use UUIDv7 internally where ordering is needed

🧰 Tooling and Ecosystem Updates

Tooling around UUIDs matured significantly in 2024:

• CLI tools like uuidgen added --version 7 flags
• Database UUID support improved in MySQL 8.2 and PostgreSQL 16
• Redis and DynamoDB usage surged with client-generated UUIDv4/v7 keys
• ORMs like Prisma, TypeORM, and Sequelize improved UUID support, especially for default generation

This tooling boom made it easier than ever to standardize UUID use across stacks — from frontend to backend to data layer.

📦 UUIDs in Distributed Systems: Patterns That Stuck

Here are some UUID-driven patterns that cemented themselves in distributed system architecture in 2024:

✅ Composite Keys with UUIDs

Mixing tenant_id + UUID in multitenant apps became best practice, e.g.:

✅ Hybrid IDs: UUIDv7 + Metadata

Teams started embedding shard IDs or environment flags in high-order bits of UUIDv8-style identifiers for advanced routing.

✅ Sortable Event IDs

Kafka keys, Firehose partitions, and log aggregation pipelines increasingly used UUIDv7 for temporal ordering without losing randomness.

🧠 Thought Leadership and Community Wisdom

Thought leaders published a wave of content on UUIDs this year:

• “Why UUIDv7 is the Future of Ordered IDs” – a top-read blog by engineers at Segment
• Podcasts explored the future of unique identifiers in decentralized systems
• Talks at QCon, GopherCon, and Strange Loop featured UUID generation as a system design building block

The consensus? UUIDs are no longer just “those weird strings” — they’re strategic infrastructure components.

Looking Ahead: What to Expect in 2025

Here’s what’s likely coming next:

• Widespread UUIDv7 adoption in managed databases
• Better observability tooling around UUID generation metrics
• Hybrid schemes combining UUIDs and ULIDs
• More declarative ID standards in frameworks like Deno, Bun, and Rust web servers

The community is trending toward UUIDs that are not just unique, but also intentional — built to suit the system’s shape, scale, and needs.

Final Thoughts

UUIDs in 2024 evolved from silent background tools to active participants in architectural decision-making. With the adoption of UUIDv7, increased observability integration, and smarter default practices across ecosystems, developers are finally treating ID generation with the respect it deserves.

Whether you’re building SaaS platforms, observability pipelines, or edge services — there’s never been a better time to rethink how your systems generate and manage identifiers.

Here’s to smarter UUIDs in 2025 🎉