As more and more of the real-world’s business and economic activity are run from the cloud, time-sensitive applications are now mission-critical. Accurately synchronized clocks are fundamental for enabling the infrastructure needed by such applications, ranging from electronic trading, mobile banking and online gaming to logging/tracing systems and IoT infrastructure.
Clockwork’s high-precision, software-based network clock synchronization system is already proving useful in sectors such as financial services, high-tech, online gaming and cryptocurrency trading – and we’re constantly discovering new opportunities when distributed network clocks can be synchronized at a precise level.
On behalf of the team at Clockwork, we’re proud to announce our Series A funding to propel our product stack into its next stage of growth and development. We found valued partners at NEA with noted technologists Greg Papadopoulos and Forest Baskett leading the $21M round, joined by angel investors Jerry Yang, John Hennessey, Neeraj Bharadwaj and Ram Shriram. (Full press release here.)
A fundamental computer systems problem
Network clock synchronization is a fundamental and challenging problem, deemed hard enough that distributed systems follow a “clockless design” paradigm. In turn, this made basic operations such as consistency, consensus, event ordering, state machine replication and snapshotting extremely difficult. With an accurate and scalable software-based clock sync system powering Clockwork’s technology stack, we can potentially rewrite a large part of the way distributed computing and packet-switched networking (technologies underlying the cloud) are currently practiced. In doing so, we can develop new solutions for time-sensitive applications that weren’t previously possible.
Introducing Latency Sensei
The first of these solutions is Latency Sensei, a powerful and fine-grained sensor of latencies in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Virtualization offers many benefits to tenants who need to scale rapidly without worrying about the underlying hardware. However, it has also made the network infrastructure opaque: users cannot access the network elements connecting their virtual machines or data containers and must simply trust their provider.
Latency Sensei clears the fog of virtualization, providing unprecedented visibility into your cloud deployment. Download our beta and see these new insights, including:
- Measure true one-way delays of a packet or remote procedure call
- Discover network bottlenecks and “hiccups” (outages lasting a few seconds)
- Identify underperforming VMs arising from “noisy neighbors”
Such information is critical in helping users assess network latency so they can optimize application performance.
What’s next?
With Clockwork’s precise clock synchronization powering our technology, we’re well-positioned to tackle major challenges in distributed systems and networking. Our team is comprised of world-class technologists who are excited to apply these new findings and build solutions for time-sensitive applications. (Sneak peek: how do you build “zero-drop networks”?). Our brains are abuzz with the new possibilities! Sign up for our mailing list and be the first to know.
Join us
We’re excited to embark on the next phase of distributed computing and continue solving challenging engineering problems. If you’re interested in joining us—as a customer, partner, or team member—please get in touch. We’d love to “sync up” and chat more.