Impact of Leap Second

What is Leap Second:

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) after midnight on 31^st Dec 2016

Leap seconds are a periodic one-second adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time(UTC) in order to keep a system's time of day close to the mean solar time. However, the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, and due to this, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable. This article seeks to provide information regarding the leap seconds, along with addressing.

Impact of Leap Second:

Leap seconds help to keep clocks aligned with Earth’s rotation, which can vary due to geologic and even weather conditions. But an extra second can wreak havoc with applications and services that depend on systems being tightly synchronized. Time synchronization is critical for keeping replica up to date, determining which data-affecting operation happened last, and correctly reporting the order of searches and clicks, the company says.

Ordinary operating systems can’t accommodate a minute that’s 61 seconds long, so some organizations have used special-case workarounds for the extra second. But sometimes these methods raise issues, like what happens to write operations that take place during that second.

Solution:

Since the leap second was inserted by IERS (International Earth Rotation Services) at the moment. We all need to check with the respective application vendor about this leap second whether they have a fix to align with NTP. Obviously, we must install the fix if your application is not synching with Network time protocol through internet.  Keep your eye on scheduled jobs which used to synch with external third party API’s