BEbelter·Dec 5, 2024Submission
1 points · Open discussionaws
clock-bound
Rust2021–2024
aws / clock-bound
clock-bound
Used to generate and compare bounded timestamps.
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
358GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Used to generate and compare bounded timestamps.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-11-22 11:31:28 UTC to 2024-12-05 18:18:12 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesPTP is part of the backbone of something like TrueTime. Meta uses their PTP infrastructure for a lot of the same basic fundamentals, including consistent read replicas, like Spanner does. PTP is a protocol for synchronizing the wall clock time of a set of computers under very tight error bounds, so that all of the servers have a very consistent and tight "view" of what time it is.
Now, independently of replica strategies, it's important to understand TrueTime is an API, to be clear, as you noted. It lets you represent some continuous interval of time based on the system clock error. You can then use this API to do things like ask "Did timestamp A occur before B?" And you can get an API equivalent to TrueTime on your own random Linux machine, using the Clock-Bound tools from AWS, combined with the chrony NTP daemon: https://github.com/aws/
Read the rest
clock-bound
The API and all that is pretty basic, actually. Rather, the secret behind TrueTime and the like is just a huge amount of reliability engineering to ensure that the upper bound target (7ms IIRC from the Spanner paper) is actually maintained reliably and accurately, at global scale. That reliability means engineers can build on it with specific guarantees. You can slap chrony, ClockBound-D, and a PTP card into your rack and program away. But it's a matter of engineering guarantees more than like, theoretical computer science. Theoretically speaking, TrueTime can only help you definitively establish that some event A has actually "happened before" B in a distributed system. That's extremely powerful but it needs muscle backing it up to be true and useful in practice.
AWS has publicly advertised that EC2 has access to their 'AWS Time Sync' service, which is a globally consistent clock synchronization service designed to provide the backbone needed for services like TrueTime, and is freely available. Assuming you are willing to trust the EC2 network and AWS engineers, you can slap chrony and ClockBound-D on your AWS instances and get a TrueTime-like API with very tight global error tolerance, which would allow you to do consistent read replicas like Spanner, among other tricks
ClockBound – Generate and compare bounded timestamps
1 points · Open discussionAWS clockbound client and daemon implemented in Rust
1 points · Open discussion