Level 3: Distributed systems · L3.1 Time, clocks, consensus & leader election
Why clocks lie
Explain clock skew and why wall-clock ordering fails.
12 min · Pro
What you take away
- Wall clocks drift, are corrected in steps, and can jump backwards — so 'later timestamp' does not mean 'happened later'.
And 3 more inside the class, in Pro.
How the class is laid out
- The problem
- The simple version
- Two clocks, two jobs
- The honest engineering answer
- Check your understanding