Context: a task ID is a unique identifier for a task. Aurora and Mesos both require this uniqueness. Within mesos, frameworks are required to craft their own task IDs as they see fit.
Our task ID format is currently [1] TIMESTAMP-ROLE-ENV-JOBNAME-INSTANCE-UUID for an example: 1453847837931-vagrant-test-http_example_docker-1-a23f55e2-151f-409e-9cea-76ec79482533 In addition to guaranteed uniqueness, this format has the benefit of being somewhat human-friendly. Within logs, it is somewhat possible to partially recognize a task based solely on the text ID. *I would like to propose that we remove the TIMESTAMP- prefix from the task ID.* It was originally included so that task IDs would be temporally sortable for scheduling prioritization. At present, tasks are not sorted using the ID. While proposing the above, i think it's also prudent to take the opportunity to consider a complete overhaul of the ID contents. *An alternative approach would be to only use the UUID.* This has the benefit of decoupling arbitrary user input from the various ways task IDs are used (as an example - mesos uses them in file names, limiting length and allowed characters). Task IDs also become fixed width, which offers a (very) marginal memory reduction over the status quo, and makes console line wrapping more consistent when perusing logs. Additionally, it eschews the potential problem of users parsing task IDs and coupling to its format. Any thoughts on this? [1] https://github.com/apache/aurora/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/aurora/scheduler/TaskIdGenerator.java
