Behold, Google’s Time Lord

Maintaining temporal consistency across a worldwide network is a surprisingly difficult yet important task. Databases need to decide the correct order in which transactions across the world took place, a process made complicated by the amount of time it takes for satellites and data centers to receive the proper time from each other. Enter Spanner, Google’s system designed by engineers Andrew Fikes, Wilson Hsieh, Jeff Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat which essentially standardizes time across its various satellites and data centers. Read more…