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Amazon Time Sync Service

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Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#11

Post by skj »

drewda wrote: post #9

Perhaps the biggest "fake-out" in 21st century computing: Google publicly released its MapReduce paper -- directing most of the rest of the industry toward loosely coupled, overly complex distributed data processing systems like Hadoop for the following decade -- but internally they just bought a bunch of atomic clocks and built a distributed RDBMS. I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuc…

Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate.

True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#12

Post by d_watt »

drewda wrote: post #9

Perhaps the biggest "fake-out" in 21st century computing: Google publicly released its MapReduce paper -- directing most of the rest of the industry toward loosely coupled, overly complex distributed data processing systems like Hadoop for the following decade -- but internally they just bought a bunch of atomic clocks and built a distributed RDBMS. I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuc…

Those aren't really equivalent, are they? Hadoop is for analytics, spanner is transactional.

In terms of popular nosql vs google sql products, it's more Hadoop : BigQuery :: Mongo? : Spanner

You're pretty explicitly not supposed to run OLAP queries on spanner.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#13

Post by drewda »

skj wrote: post #11
drewda wrote: post #9

Perhaps the biggest "fake-out" in 21st century computing: Google publicly released its MapReduce paper -- directing most of the rest of the industry toward loosely coupled, overly complex distributed data processing systems like Hadoop for the following decade -- but internally they just bought a bunch of atomic clocks and built a distributed RDBMS. I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuc…

Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate. True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

Yes, which is why it's amusing in hindsight that for a decade everyone* outside Google was forcing all* their distributed data tasks into the MapReduce paradigm, without considering alternative approaches like the one used by Spanner.

* slight exaggerations, I know

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#14

Post by tyingq »

sizediterable wrote: post #8
tyingq wrote: post #5

I'm curious about the title on this submission. I thought TrueTime had unusually strong guarantees about accuracy that don't seem to be called out in what I'm reading on the linked article.

Sorry if it's a bit sensationalized. I wanted to give some color as to why this release might be interesting and took this tweet I saw at face value https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1455923426359578631

Oh, I wasn't criticizing, just genuinely curious. If the AWS service has a similar design, that's interesting to me. AWS doesn't seem to say much about the details.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#15

Post by [deleted] »

drewda wrote: post #9

Perhaps the biggest "fake-out" in 21st century computing: Google publicly released its MapReduce paper -- directing most of the rest of the industry toward loosely coupled, overly complex distributed data processing systems like Hadoop for the following decade -- but internally they just bought a bunch of atomic clocks and built a distributed RDBMS. I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuc…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#16

Post by mrep »

drewda wrote: post #13
skj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate. True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

Yes, which is why it's amusing in hindsight that for a decade everyone* outside Google was forcing all* their distributed data tasks into the MapReduce paradigm, without considering alternative approaches like the one used by Spanner. * slight exaggerations, I know

I'm not sure how you think a distributed data processing technology would "fake-out" other companies when building/choosing database technology. They are totally different problem sets.

MapReduce does not have a set in stone data source/sink and can use multiple things like bigtable and spanner so they are complementary technologies.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#17

Post by quin3 »

drewda wrote: post #13
skj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate. True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

Yes, which is why it's amusing in hindsight that for a decade everyone* outside Google was forcing all* their distributed data tasks into the MapReduce paradigm, without considering alternative approaches like the one used by Spanner. * slight exaggerations, I know

It’s not even related. No one was running OLTP workloads as MapReduce jobs at any point.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#18

Post by morei »

tyingq wrote: post #5

I'm curious about the title on this submission. I thought TrueTime had unusually strong guarantees about accuracy that don't seem to be called out in what I'm reading on the linked article.

Not quite: Truetime has guarantees about ordering, rather than accuracy.

If you ask for the time and get A, and then ask for the time again and get B, then Truetime guarantees that A is less than B.

Obviously, in a distributed setting this is much easier to do if you have accurately sync'ed clocks, but that accuracy goes to reducing the uncertainty in the time (and hence making truetime faster) rather than providing accuracy.

Re: Amazon Time Sync Service

#20

Post by LaserToy »

drewda wrote: post #13
skj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses map reduce extensively... where it's appropriate. True time helps with things like spanner transactions. It's just a totally different use case.

Yes, which is why it's amusing in hindsight that for a decade everyone* outside Google was forcing all* their distributed data tasks into the MapReduce paradigm, without considering alternative approaches like the one used by Spanner. * slight exaggerations, I know

Spanner didn’t exist in 2012.
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