Company
Date Published
Author
Matthew Helmke
Word count
911
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

As clocks change for Daylight Savings Time, systems relying on timestamps are vulnerable to synchronization issues, potentially leading to message loss, communication disruptions, and incorrect certificate expiration notices. Even systems set to UTC face challenges with leap years and leap seconds. To mitigate these risks, engineers can use Gremlin's Time Travel attack to simulate time changes, identify potential issues, and fix them before they cause significant disruptions. This approach involves testing the system under varying conditions, including different time zones and distributed environments, to uncover hidden vulnerabilities. By doing so, engineers can enhance the reliability of their systems and prevent widespread impact. Gremlin offers an automated platform to test and improve system availability, with features like Time Travel chaos experiments that help identify and address risks associated with time changes.