Clock Skew in Distributed Systems: Problems and Solutions
Explore how clock skew affects distributed systems, causes silent data corruption, breaks conflict resolution, and what you can do to mitigate these issues.
Explore how clock skew affects distributed systems, causes silent data corruption, breaks conflict resolution, and what you can do to mitigate these issues.
Understand Lamport timestamps and logical clocks for ordering distributed events without synchronized physical clocks. Learn how to determine what happened before what.
Learn how physical clocks work in distributed systems, including NTP synchronization, clock sources, and the limitations of wall-clock time for ordering events.
Learn how Google uses TrueTime for globally distributed transactions with external consistency. Covers the Spanner system, time bounded uncertainty, and HW-assisted synchronization.
Learn how vector clocks track full causal history to detect concurrent updates, enable conflict detection, and support automatic conflict resolution in distributed databases.