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Book Cover

Beyond Clocks
Time, Causality, and State
in Distributed Systems

A deep yet accessible exploration of one of the most fundamental and most misunderstood dimensions of distributed computing: time.

Hardcover: 979-8-2753-8639-4 Paperback: 979-8-2753-4327-4 E-Book: B0GGZF19X5

Table of Contents LinkedIn @gakhov

About the book

"Beyond Clocks: Time, Causality, and State in Distributed Systems" by A. Gakhov is a deep yet accessible exploration of one of the most fundamental and most misunderstood dimensions of distributed computing: time.

For centuries, philosophers and physicists have debated the nature of time and causality. Today, these same concepts lie at the heart of modern distributed software, where systems must reason about events that happen concurrently, across unreliable networks, without any shared global clock. The book bridges that ancient-to-modern gap, showing how timeless ideas shape today's cloud architectures, databases, and streaming engines.

"Beyond Clocks" provides both the theoretical grounding and the practical understanding needed to design, analyze, and reason about distributed systems that rely on subtle notions of time and causality. It is ideal for engineers, researchers, and students who want to go deeper than typical system design books and understand why modern systems behave the way they do.

Table Of Contents

Foundations of Time

Philosophical and physical perspectives, how time is measured, and why synchronizing clocks at global scale is inherently difficult.

  • Philosophy of Time
  • Time in Physics
  • Measuring of Time
  • Synchronization
  • Global Time

Causality

The happened-before relation, causal chains, and how distributed systems make ordering without physical time

  • Events
  • Happened-before
  • Probabilistic Causality

Virtual Time

Virtual time mechanisms - including scalar, vector, matrix, and hybrid logical clocks, forming the backbone of consistency and coordination in decentralized systems.

  • Physical Time
  • Scalar Clocks
  • Vector Clocks
  • Matrix Clocks
  • Hybrid Time

Distributed State and Consistency

Communication models, message ordering, global snapshots, and the constraints that make consistency hard.

  • Communication Channels
  • Message Delivery Order
  • Global State
  • Consistent Checkpoints

Checkpointing Algorithms

From classic snapshot algorithms to proactive consistency techniques used in modern fault-tolerant platforms.

  • Foundational Snapshots
  • Optimized Snapshots
  • Proactive Consistency

Applications

Showing how these ideas are implemented in production systems such as Riak (version vectors), Apache Flink (checkpointing), MongoDB (causal consistency), and ZooKeeper (transaction ordering).

  • Version Vectors in Riak
  • Causal Consistency in MongoDB
  • ZooKeeper Transaction ID
  • Checkpointing in Flink

Andrii Gakhov, Ph.D.

Andrii Gakhov is a mathematician and software engineer holding a Ph.D. in mathematical modeling and numerical methods. He has been a teacher in the School of Computer Science at V. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine for a number of years and currently works as CTO at ferret go GmbH, the leading community moderation, automation, and analytics company in Germany. His fields of interest include software design, data processing, and distributed systems.

Andrii Gakhov



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Errata

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