2 posts tagged with "Logical Clocks"

Distributed systems operate across multiple independent nodes, making it difficult to establish a single global clock. Logical clocks enable efficient event ordering without synchronized physical clocks, ensuring consistency in distributed systems. However, physical clocks may still be preferred in scenarios requiring real-world timestamping, such as financial transactions or legal record-keeping, where absolute time consistency is crucial. This blog post explores the concepts of logical clocks, their types, and their use cases in distributed systems.

Ordering, in the context of distributed systems, refers to the ability to maintain a well-defined sequence of events or operations across multiple independent nodes. It is a fundamental challenge impacting everything from database consistency to consensus protocols and event-driven architectures. Ensuring a well-defined sequence of operations in an unreliable network is inherently difficult. This blog post explores why ordering is hard in distributed systems, common strategies to address it, and trade-offs involved.