[author]

NTP runs fairly decently in a VM. Don't take my word for it — look at the graphs of my servers:

Here's my Google VM, notice the jitter is within +/- 5 milliseconds:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/104.155.144.4

Here's my Hetzner VM (Germany). +/- 10 milliseconds, though I can't help but suspect the distance from the monitoring station (Los Angeles) may have more to do with it than being a VM:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/78.46.204.247

Here's my AWS VM. Much worse than Google in that it's +/- 50 milliseconds, but still good enough to pass muster with pool.ntp.org:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.0.56.137

Here's my Azure VM. It's in Singapore, and I re-deployed it last night, so the numbers are still coming in, but it has a pretty tight distribution:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.187.42.158

I had the same thought. Does the world really need another (presumably) stratum-3 server running in Amazon's cluster, when Amazon already runs a pool of stratum-2 servers? ([0-3].amazon.pool.ntp.org).

You're not supposed to run an NTP server on a VM. The CPU cycles can be taken from the guest and perhaps used by the host or another guest. Other options that are available, is to drill a hole in the data center and run a GPS receiver to the roof and get the time from the GPS satellites. I think that is something many VPS/cloud providers will not allow.

Edit: s/your/you're/

t1.micro to boot - with more than the usual nondeterministic statmuxing and arbitrary "fairness" policy.