Time-sync-as-service

Currently, Openstack provides a provision for time synchronization via running a NTP server on the control node (http://docs.openstack.org/havana/install-guide/install/yum/content/basics-ntp.html). All the VM's are suggested to synchronize their timing from the time server running on the control node in turn.

Multiple tenants can be orchestrated and monitored in the purview of single administrator and openstack framework. What if different tenants want to synchronization time from different time source for their own reasons, business and trust. An example to this could be a tenant network is geographically distributed and want to synchronize the time of his network from a specific time source and ensure all his geographically distributed network has same time to avoid any business loss.

Our idea will provide a flexibility of having multiple time synchronization server's per tenant by extending neutron's advanced service plugin framework and providing time synchronization using Network Time Protocol (NTP) or any other equivalent standard time synchronization protocol (This could be vendor specific). In our implementation we have chosen NTP as the time synchronization protocol (for details refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol). Moreover, we can also extend our idea to have a single time server which will synchronize it's time from an external
source running on the network node and all the VM's in turn can synchronize their time from NTP agents which will be running separately for each tenants. In addition to this NTP authentication functionality can also be explored to ensure authenticity and reliability of the synchronized time.