Clockwork Eliminates Packet Drops and Improves Cloud Network Performance with Launch of Cloud Deluxe Platform

Clockwork Systems, developer of technology for advanced, time-sensitive cloud applications, announced the launch of its Cloud Deluxe platform—a suite of software tools that reduce latency, eliminates almost all packet drops and optimize network performance to lower costs and improve user experience.

Cloud Deluxe addresses several technical challenges that impede performance and drive-up costs for customer-facing applications and AI/ML workloads. These challenges include underperforming virtual machines (VMs), high latency and network jitter, as well as packet drops that can cause application-level delays and timeouts. The software can be deployed in on-premises, cloud, edge or hybrid networks in minutes and across a broad range of computing environments, including bare metal, VMs, and containers.

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“The cloud is built on 30–50-year-old networking and computing technologies developed under a ‘clockless’ paradigm, limiting it to deliver only ‘best-effort’ service. Organizations running apps on such infrastructure are unable to extract optimal efficiency,” said Clockwork Co-founder Balaji Prabhakar. “Cloud Deluxe rectifies clockless designs and significantly improves performance. It can reveal latency and bandwidth bottlenecks in deployments and, what’s more, it can eliminate them. Every company, whether it is running latency-sensitive applications or training large language models like ChatGPT, stands to benefit, enabling it to do more with less. In effect, Cloud Deluxe puts a ‘silver lining’ in the cloud.”

Cloud Deluxe comprises several features to help organizations improve performance, lower costs, and deliver the best experience to customers and users with no hardware upgrade or support. The suite of features includes:

• Latency Sensei: Monitors complex networks in on-prem and cloud environments to deliver continuous visibility, raise real-time performance alerts and provide on-demand reports on cluster performance that enable network admins to take action.
• VM Colocator: Identifies whether two or more VMs are sharing a physical server so tenants can spread out their VM fleets and minimize “noisy sibling” VMs.
• UniChron API: An API with accurate and dynamic bounds on clock accuracy.
• Packet Rocket: This has two unique components: (1) Congestion Elimination: Identifies and eliminates bandwidth bottlenecks by dramatically reducing network latency and creating near “zero-drop” networks, and (2) Bandwidth Slicing: Easily creates “programmable bandwidth slices” between VMs, allowing admins to prioritize traffic and ensure critical applications have the bandwidth they need.
• Sense-and-Control Dashboard: Cloud Deluxe’s unique, interactive control panel gives network admins the ability to not only monitor network performance (i.e., one-way, sense-only functionality), but also to control the networking functions In VMs hosted by their cloud provider (two-way, sense-and-control functionality).

“When network congestion slows cloud app execution, the standard approach is to spin up extra VMs to reduce latency and preserve user experience; but autoscaling increases cloud costs drastically,” said Dan Zheng, Vice President of Partnerships and Operations at Clockwork. “Cloud Deluxe improves performance by eliminating network congestion even under high loads, postponing the need for autoscaling until it is really needed. As the industry embrace AI/ML, especially LLMs, data flows will increase exponentially, causing rampant congestion. Cloud Deluxe can significantly reduce congestion in such scenarios. Being purely software-based, it can be readily deployed on all major clouds, including in multi- and hybrid cloud configurations.”

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Clockwork is working with a number of major enterprise corporations as well as leading technology, e-commerce, and financial services companies that are either significant users or providers of cloud computing services.

“Clockwork Systems is helping us gain better visibility into our complex multi-cloud environment,” said Albert Greenberg, Vice President of Platform Engineering at Uber. “Clockwork’s breakthrough technology can pinpoint congestion bottlenecks with accurate latency measurements—and fix the problem by killing packet delays and eliminating packet drops. We’re impressed by the trials so far, and we’re exploring the potential for Clockwork’s Cloud Deluxe software to help us build high-performance network infrastructure on top of generic cloud environments.”

“I have been following the impressive work of the Clockwork team for several years. Their use of accurate time stamps to enable detailed measurements of network, VM and application performance will have a great positive impact on cloud ops. It fits well with our approach for measuring latency inside our data centers,” said David A. Maltz, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure. “It has been great to partner with Clockwork’s team as we’ve conducted successful trials on Azure, and, moving forward, we believe their tech will prove highly effective in identifying and eliminating network bottlenecks.”

“I’ve collaborated with the Clockwork team since their Stanford days. They solve a decades-old problem in scalable, high-accuracy network clock sync,” said Amin Vahdat, Engineering Fellow and Vice President, Google Cloud. “It’s a foundational technology and Clockwork’s application of it can solve basic problems like obtaining accurate one-way delay measurements, removing packet jitters using hold/release buffers, reducing congestion and packet drops, and building fault-tolerant consensus protocols.”

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