Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System

Before you start

Assumes

partial orders, and accepting that a shared "now" is not available; the rest is built in the paper

FreeAdvanced8 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

• The Part-Time ParliamentLeslie Lamport, 1998The original Paxos paper: a protocol for agreeing a value among unreliable processors, told as a parable about a parliament.
• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log ProcessingJay Kreps, Neha Narkhede & Jun Rao, 2011Models a message queue as a partitioned, replayable commit log, which turned out to suit far more than logs.
• Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed SystemsFriedemann Mattern, 1989Generalises Lamport's logical clocks into vector clocks, giving processes a way to determine precisely which events could and could not have influenced each other.
• Logical Physical Clocks and Consistent Snapshots in Globally Distributed DatabasesSandeep S. Kulkarni et al., 2014Combines physical and logical clocks so causality tracking gets the compactness of physical timestamps without losing Lamport's ordering guarantee.