Rock around the Clock (Synchronization): Improve Performance with High Precision Time!

Tuesday, 29 October, 2024 - 16:4517:05 GMT

Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Clockwork Systems

Abstract: 

Is the app slow or the network lagging? When it comes to latency in distributed systems, it can be hard to identify where exactly the issue is. As businesses increasingly adopt diverse deployment environments —on-premises, cloud, or hybrid— the complexity grows, obscuring visibility into system health. Join me to hear why clock synchronization is key for identifying the true culprit when latency is due to contention in the network. I’ll demo how network contention impacts tail latencies followed by an overview of clock synchronization protocols to date, their pros and cons, and best practices in disciplining clocks, as well as recent algorithms from Stanford Research. With high precision clock synchronization at scale, we gain back visibility into useful one way delay metrics, which act as an early signal for network congestion that help us prevent impact to response times for our end users!

Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Clockwork Systems

Lerna is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Clockwork Systems where she helps customers meet their performance goals with software solutions built on Clockwork.io’s foundational research. Prior to this, she was a Senior Solutions Architect serving Global Financial Services customers at AWS for 3 years. Before that, Lerna spent 17 years as an infrastructure engineer in large financial services companies working on authentication systems, distributed caching, and multi region deployments using IaC and CI/CD to name a few. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, sightseeing and backyard astronomy.

BibTeX
@conference {302207,
author = {Lerna Ekmekcioglu},
title = {Rock around the Clock (Synchronization): Improve Performance with High Precision Time!},
year = {2024},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video