Clocks

Why is the time necessary?

Before we go deeper into the phenomenon of clock skew, let’s look at why the notion of time is essential in software applications:

• If we are watching a video online and the video frames arrive out of order so that latter scenes appear before the earlier scenes, then the user experience isn’t good.

• The notion of time becomes very important in the field of observability to calculate essential metrics. For example:

  • What is the average latency of a particular endpoint?

  • What is the throughput of a specific service over a sliding window of five minutes?

  • What is the peak time during which most of the traffic on the website occurs?

• In database replication, time synchronization is a fundamental construct for replicating and sequencing the data. If the transactions arrive out of order, such that the newer transactions execute before the older transactions, the results are catastrophic leading to data loss.

• Having a deterministic notion of time is very helpful when tracing a distributed request for measuring the time taken by each component and the ...