Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/16/clockwork-raises-21m-to-keep-server-clocks-in-sync/
You’d think that synchronizing the clocks across a fleet of modern servers is a solved problem, but it’s actually quite a hard challenge to solve, especially if you want to get to nanosecond accuracy. This also means that it remains an axiom in computer science that you should never build a system based on clock time. Clockwork.io, which is announcing a $21 million Series A funding round today, promises to change this with sync accuracy as low as 5 nanoseconds with hardware timestamps and hundreds of nanoseconds with software timestamps.
Based on this work, the company is also launching its first product today, Latency Sensei, which can give its users extremely fine-grained latency data in their cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, which they can then use to find bottlenecks and tune their networks. The company’s customers already include the likes of Nasdaq, Wells Fargo and RBC.