Winter 2023 Newsletter with the latest happenings from Clockwork.io
As we wrap up 2023 and reflect on the year’s successes, the Clockwork team would like to thank you for following our progress and take a moment to spotlight our latest solutions.
Building upon the technical foundation of our highly accurate clock sync solution, earlier this year we released Cloud Deluxe™ — a suite of software tools for a unified host-based network congestion control and monitoring system (read more in TechCrunch). Combined with Latency Sensei, it runs across on-prem data centers and multi-clouds to provide a single pane for fine-grained control and observability.
In our customer conversations, we’ve learned about common technical challenges that Clockwork.io’s solutions help address – reach out if any resonate with you:
Manage Complex Cloud Environments
As companies like Uber move to the cloud, they transition from fully controlled on-prem data centers to complex hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud environments which lack visibility and control across the entire system.
In a joint talk at Oracle CloudWorld in September, Clockwork co-founder Balaji Prabhakar presented with Uber’s Senior Director of Engineering Sekhar Pasupuleti on the challenges Pasupuleti’s team faced with Uber’s cloud migration, and how Clockwork.io’s Latency Sensei and Packet Rocket addresses these issues by providing both network observability and controllability.
Latency Sensei provides visibility and insight into cloud deployments, with 24/7 monitoring to provide real-time information across disparate environments to monitor performance (throughput, delays, packet losses, bottlenecks) and understand VM availability and topology, e.g. colocation.
Packet Rocket goes beyond observability with “zero-drop” congestion control that automatically reduces delays and jitter at the network edges, eliminating virtually all packet drops to achieve near-zero packet loss, reduced latency, and full bandwidth utilization.
Check out the datasheet and let us know if you’d like a copy of the presentation.
Isolate Bandwidth (QoS)
Companies that have multiple workloads sharing the same network or WAN links don’t want lower priority workloads interfering with high priority ones…but there’s no easy way to provide QoS / bandwidth isolation. If you do have access to the network switches, it’s a tedious process to program each one individually.
Bandwidth Slicer is a QoS panel for dynamically slicing bandwidth across applications and traffic types to fit whatever configuration you need. APIs or an intuitive software interface lets you easily prioritize traffic and ensure critical applications have the necessary bandwidth for ever-changing workloads. No network support or hardware configuration is required.
Reduce Application Tail Latency
Companies with user-facing applications – such as ride hailing or delivery services, marketplaces, social networks, AI bots, etc. – aim to reduce tail latency of these apps without consuming additional compute resources.
Packet Rocket detects and mitigates network congestion with no in-network support required. By intelligently pacing packets and achieving near-zero packet drops, tests show a 2-3x improvement in network performance, depending on traffic shape and network configuration.
Speed Up AI/ML Training
With AI’s rapid explosion this year, competition for the powerful resources required heated up fast, and companies need ways to speed up distributed AI training workloads. At the AI Conference in September, Senior Software Engineer Vinay Sriram presented results showing how Latency Sensei and Packet Rocket significantly shorten time needed for LLM training and inference on TCP/IP+Ethernet networks. Watch the video recording here.
High-Accuracy Clock Sync
Organizations such as large financial institutions need to sync clocks accurately across on-prem data centers and public clouds for compliance or to stay competitive. Clockwork’s Clock Sync decouples clocks from network hardware so there’s no need for expensive upgrades, and you can easily scale across size and distance.
Not sure why time sync is important? Diginomica wrote a nice overview, “Clockwork – discovering wasted bandwidth between the nanoseconds.”
Learn More
Our solutions address a variety of technical challenges to help companies improve performance, reduce cost and complexity, and provide best-in-class user experience to millions of users. Learn more on our website, through our videos, and contact us for a demo at hello@clockwork.io.