I can't comment on infrastructure in AWS, but I worked at an observatory for a hot minute when they used Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Their scheme was to reco

I can't comment on infrastructure in AWS, but I worked at an observatory for a hot minute when they used Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Their scheme was to record telemetry from all aspects of the observatory -- hardware state, environmental and atmospheric conditions, software and system state, commands, etc. The intent was to build a hyper-precise set of telemetry that could be used to retroactively reprocess old imaging from the observatory as more imaging and telemetry was generated and it would be easier to do that with more accurate timing. With this level of resolution, multiple observatories can more effectively share and synthesize data; if you know the state of two observatories down to the tens or hundreds of nanoseconds you can do more advanced work with synthetic aperture imaging. Beyond astronomy my other guess is that PTP or similar tech might be used for high frequency trading; it might also be useful for creating distributed systems; Google's Cloud Spanner uses TrueTime which IIRC is a proprietary equivalent of PTP.