StartupsByteByteGoabout 1 hour ago
A Beginner's Guide to Clocks, Causality, and Ordering in Distributed Systems
2 min read
Distributed systems lack a shared clock, making event ordering a hard problem. Hardware clocks drift, and NTP cannot fully align them. Clock differences can cause later updates to be discarded, logs to place effects before causes, and operations to act on stale data. Logical clocks, vector clocks, hybrid logical clocks, and Google Spanner each address different aspects of ordering.
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