Learning about time synchronization with chrony and NTP

In this section, you will understand the importance of time synchronization and how to configure the service.

With connected systems, it is important to keep a source of truth in regards to timing (think about bank accounts, incoming transfer wires, outgoing payments, and more that must be correctly timestamped and sorted). Also, consider tracing logs between users connecting, issues happening, and so on; they all need to be in sync so that we can diagnose and debug between all the different systems involved.

You might think that the system clock, which is defined when the system is provisioned, should be OK, but setting the system clock is not enough as the clocks tend to drift; internal batteries can cause the clock to drift or to even reset, and even intense CPU activity can affect it. To keep clocks accurate, they need to be regularly synced against a reference clock that fixes the drift and tries to anticipate future...