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In today’s digital world, we all expect apps to work quickly and seamlessly, no lag, no waiting—just a smooth, efficient experience. For site reliability engineers (SREs) and data platform engineers, this is more than just a goal; it’s essential. These teams are tasked with making sure applications, databases, and systems perform well, meeting strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for latency and uptime. But keeping applications responsive and reliable can be a challenge, especially when those applications run in Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes has become a go-to solution for containerizing and managing applications, and for good reason—it’s flexible and can handle scaling […]

Precision Timing—A Game Changer for Real-Time Applications In a digital ecosystem where milliseconds matter, precise timestamping isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. Whether you’re managing a high-frequency trading platform, handling critical telecom infrastructure, responding to cybersecurity incidents, or operating latency-sensitive applications, the accuracy of your event timestamps can make or break your performance or limit your ability to consistently meet legal mandates requiring high precision time synchronization. Yet, synchronizing clocks across geographically dispersed locations has long been a costly, complex, and infrastructure-heavy challenge. Let’s dive into why exact time synchronization matters, the limitations of traditional methods, and how Clockwork […]

Let’s face it—cloud services are fantastic. They empower you to build scalable, resilient applications leveraging virtualized compute instances, Kubernetes, and cloud databases. But what happens when those apps start to feel sluggish, unresponsive, or underperforming for no obvious reason? You’ve checked CPU, memory, and disk I/O, and everything seems fine. So what’s the deal?

The hidden culprit could be network throttling by your cloud provider, impacting latency, errors, traffic, and saturation—the four golden signals of system reliability.

In today’s fast-paced world, a seamless digital experience can make or break your business. When customers interact with your applications, they expect instantaneous responses consistently. Any lag or delay can lead to frustration, diminished satisfaction, and ultimately, a loss of business. Accurate, real-time data on network performance isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. Let’s dive into why this matters and can now be realized cost-effectively for any real-world scenario utilizing distributed workloads.

Recently, the Clockwork team sponsored both Google Cloud Next ‘24 and Cisco Live in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure of talking to hundreds of people who stopped by our booth to chat about their challenges managing hybrid, multi-cloud networks, and discuss Cloud Deluxe, Clockwork’s congestion control solution. One challenge we heard repeatedly was the need for Quality of Service (QoS) to address performance degradation when primary workloads are disrupted by resource contention from concurrent tasks like backups, observability, and security processes. If this resonates with you, we’d love to learn more in this quick survey. Clockwork’s Bandwidth Slicer addresses […]

In this blogpost, we evaluate the accuracy and reliability of three clock sync systems: Standard ntpd vs. Chrony with cloud-optimized configuration vs. Clockwork.

In this follow-up blog post on the impact of VM colocation on networking performance, find out how network latency and network packet drops are affected by VM colocation.

When cloud providers place too many of a customer’s VMs on the same physical host, the performance of the VMs is impaired. Find out how VM colocation affects network bandwidth in this blogpost.