Worth noting that this has become considerably less of a barrier lately: > Most noticeably, Zanzibar is built with Spanner Google’s distributed database, and S

Worth noting that this has become considerably less of a barrier lately: > Most noticeably, Zanzibar is built with Spanner Google’s distributed database, and Spanner has the ability to order timestamps using TrueTime, which relies on atomic clocks and GPS antennae: this is not standard equipment for a server. Even CockroachDB, which is explicitly modeled off of Spanner, can’t rely on having GPS & atomic clocks around so it has to take a very different approach. GPS based timing is very accurate (not atomic clock accurate), and very good boards can be a couple hundred dollars, based around chips like the U-blox LEA-M8F or it's newer variants. @jeffgeerling has been going through a bunch of the various offerings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893922 If that's not good enough chip-scale atomic like the CASC-SA65 is "only" $5-$3k. https://www.microchipdirect.com/product/090-02789-001?srsltid=AfmBOopd9WchiacqzzqSgKUx38AAqlUv8jaNkltXQwtiUjYEzeZ7_Dha https://www.microchipdirect.com/product/090-02789-001?srslti... It'd be very interesting to assess what the requirements really are, what the threat analysis really is. My instinct says that even advanced attacks are unlikely to be problematic, that rarely will cutting off access this millisecond or that make a huge difference. But most people aren't safeguarding extremely high value systems that would incentivized advanced persistent threats to sit there finding out. Really cool to see skip-lists involved; very fun having a datastructure that integrates statistics. I'm kind of surprised how little advancement there's been here since Pugh introduced them in 1989.