> “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [resear…
None of the services you mentioned need even close to nanosecond precision between servers to operate. Applications that do (other than the ones in the article like Spanner) are concentrated in supercomputing/scientific computing and spend a LOT of money on the problem. So yeah if you are letting your clocks drift by multiple seconds you aren't "using time" in any real sense. If these folks can achieve what they want…
No, not really. I work in finance (HFT, systematic market making) and this industry heavily relies on high precision clock sync. It's even regulated by law (MiFID II); in practice everyone on the street uses PTP because if you don't know how fast you're really going or where your latency spikes you already lost the race, just don't know about it.
There's a couple of other domains where micro- and nanosecond level time sync is of paramount importance. PTP has become much cheaper over the years especially when you are in a data centre and can get it as a service instead of setting up grand-masters, slaves, GPS antennas, etc.
This statement just reads like badly researched topic on their part.