> It sounds to me that non-Googles are specifying bound parameters that, unlike Google, they cannot guarantee.
I've been complaining about this for years and it's so nice to see others echo the sentiment. Everyone chases timestamps but in reality they're harder to get right than most people are willing to acknowledge.
Very few places get NTP right at large-scale, or at least within accuracies required for this class of consistently. I've never seen anyone seriously measure their SLO for clock drift, often because their observability stack is incapable of achieving the necessary resolutions. Most places hand-wave the issue entirely and just assume their clocks will be fine.
The paper linked within TFA suggests a hybrid clock which is better but still carries some complications. I'll continue to recommend vector clocks despite their shortcomings.
I've been complaining about this for years and it's so nice to see others echo the sentiment. Everyone chases timestamps but in reality they're harder to get right than most people are willing to acknowledge.
Very few places get NTP right at large-scale, or at least within accuracies required for this class of consistently. I've never seen anyone seriously measure their SLO for clock drift, often because their observability stack is incapable of achieving the necessary resolutions. Most places hand-wave the issue entirely and just assume their clocks will be fine.
The paper linked within TFA suggests a hybrid clock which is better but still carries some complications. I'll continue to recommend vector clocks despite their shortcomings.