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This makes sense to me. Very few of us have the resources to maintain, for example, the kind of globally synced (way beyond typical NTP) clock infrastructure that Google has (TrueTime[1]).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

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If you want to know just how hard this can be with bare metal that you control, take a look at this: https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/

On the other hand, if you run in Google Compute Engine you get accurate clock discipline for free.

This is just best effort on google's end right? Don't think anything is documented/guaranteed such that you would be able to, for ex. rely on it like spanner's use of true time.

Sure, you'd have to invent the rest, but TrueTime isn't about having perfect clocks, it's about estimating the error of your peer's clocks. Having a reasonable platform clock is a good starting point, and addresses the problems discussed in the Jane Street article.

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