Questions about time and clocks in the data center

Question

I have some questions about time in the Azure deata center and what assumptions we can make.
 
1. What time zone does do data center machines run in?

2. Can we make any assumptions about machines in Azure having the correct time? How is time kept up to date and corrected?

3. What degree of agreement between clocks can we expect across machines in the data center? Will they be within a few seconds of each other? Within a minute of each other?

5. Is there a master time service, or some means to query the data center for its official time?

6. When we put a blob into cloud storage, is the LastModified time set by the machine doing the storing (which might be local to my enterprise) or is it set by the data center?

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David Pallmann, Director, .NET Application Development, Neudesic

Answer 1

David,
 We are currently investigating all of the details about your question to make sure our answer is correct to the current behavior and our policy. I can give some answers at this time.

1) Current timezone is PST, but we may change it in future to UTC. (There was a preivous thread discussing the timezone)

5) No, the time is maintained by the fabric without exposing any master time server. Any type of queries wouldn't be very exact due to the potential roundtrip times.
6) The LastModified time is set based on the server that does the final commit of the blob. It uses the UTC rather than any local time.