It can be used to optimize consensus and transaction protocols.

Consensus example - check out Nezha (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03285), they came up with an interesting 'Deadline Ordered Multicast' (DOM) primitive

> DOM follows Liskov's suggestion of "depending on clock synchronization for performance but not for correctness"

Transactions example - look no further than DynamoDB, https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/08/distributed-transa...

> In order to relieve your anxiety before you read further, no, correctness does not depend on timestamps, clock synchronization only helps to improve performance, as more accurate clocks result in more successful transactions and a serialization order that complies with real time.

I can't comment on infrastructure in AWS, but I worked at an observatory for a hot minute when they used Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Their scheme was to record telemetry from all aspects of the observatory -- hardware state, environmental and atmospheric conditions, software and system state, commands, etc. The intent was to build a hyper-precise set of telemetry that could be used to retroactively reprocess old imaging from the observatory as more imaging and telemetry was generated and it would be easier to do that with more accurate timing.

With this level of resolution, multiple observatories can more effectively share and synthesize data; if you know the state of two observatories down to the tens or hundreds of nanoseconds you can do more advanced work with synthetic aperture imaging.

Beyond astronomy my other guess is that PTP or similar tech might be used for high frequency trading; it might also be useful for creating distributed systems; Google's Cloud Spanner uses TrueTime which IIRC is a proprietary equivalent of PTP.

High frequency trading (measuring latency, inferring event ordering, etc). Since most crypto derivatives trading takes place at ap-northeast-1, it feels like AWS is orienting this release towards financial markets customers.

It’s helpful in coordinating distributed systems, like how Google uses “TrueTime” in Spanner to ensure external consistency: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

Garden variety NTP time / system time I wouldn’t trust as an oracle for distributed systems but this kind of high precision time is probably suitable for that use.

HFT crypto trading.