distrTime

distrTime is a distributed time management framework designed to provide consistent time references across multiple computing nodes. It offers synchronized wall-clock time, monotonic time, and standardized time-stamps for events in distributed systems, enabling reliable duration measurements and causal ordering across services and data centers.

At its core, distrTime accommodates clock drift by deploying a cluster of time anchors that expose a common reference time. Nodes periodically exchange time samples to estimate skew and apply drift corrections. The framework supports both physical time and logical time to preserve causality when network delays cause time differences. A monotonic time API ensures that time values advance strictly, even if the system clock is adjusted.

Architecture and API: A distrTime deployment comprises a time service cluster, client libraries, and a time store. The service uses a consensus-based mechanism to agree on time intervals and resolved timestamps, while clients retrieve current time or generate signed timestamps for events. The API also provides time translation, time zone handling, and duration calculations for downstream applications. The design emphasizes low latency and fault tolerance, with graceful degradation when components are unreachable.

Usage and applications: distrTime supports distributed databases, event streams, tracing and logging, distributed scheduling, and performance profiling by providing a single, consistent time foundation and reliable ordering of events. It is intended to complement existing time protocols such as NTP and PTP by focusing on microservice environments and strong causality guarantees rather than large-scale time synchronization alone.

See also: NTP, PTP, Lamport clocks, vector clocks, causal ordering, time synchronization, monotonic clocks.