title: Nodejs Shortid on Elastic Beanstalk
body: <p>I would like to use the shortid module from npm to generate unique URLs in an application running at AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The documentation says that a unique worker id should be set for each instance of node.js using shortid to guarantee uniqueness. Is there any simple way to assign ids between 0 to N to the EB instances?</p>
  
  <p>The only solution I could think of so far is to use DynamoDB to store the list of running instances or a list of available ids and update as new node.js servers are launched/killed, but it seems to me there must be a simpler way to do this, is there? Couldn't find much information about this so far.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>