TrueTime is a highly available, distributed clock that is provided to applications on all Google servers.

Comparing to standard datetime libraries, instead of a particular timestamp, TrueTime’s now() function returns an interval of time [earliest, latest].

It also provides two functions:

  1. after(t) returns true if t has definitely passed (e.g. t < now().earliest)
  2. before(t) returns true if t has definitely not arrived (e.g. t > now().latest)