5 ms·
The combination of a time and guaranteed error bound can be used as a primitive in distributed systems. You can get timestamps from requests coming from differe
by foota 5y ago
The combination of a time and guaranteed error bound can be used as a primitive in distributed systems. You can get timestamps from requests coming from different systems and relate them in a meaningful way. At least, in a false negative fashion. E.g., if A occurs at T + 100ms with 1ms uncertainty and B occurs at T + 105ms with 2ms uncertainty you can conclude that A happened before B. This does not allow you to always establish an order (e.g., if there is overlap) but this isn't always necessary. For instance if instead you are B and you want to have something occur after some time A with uncertainty A_uncertainty, then you can sleep until B with uncertainty B_uncertainty such that B - B_uncertainty > A + A_uncertainty.
- bigsparky 5y agoYou must know some pretty smart five year olds!
- foota 5y agoThat doesn't say L5? /s I missed that part :-)
- gnu8 5y agoNone of this has to do with Amazon though. I am very uncomfortable with Amazon (or the others) pretending that they invented precision timekeeping and that it is a special feature only they have because it seems like a lot of people believe it and build systems that rely on an API that is proprietary to a cloud vendor rather than just installing ntp.