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Target customers: Industries that heavily rely on highly accurate timekeeping, such as finance, communications, scientific research, and astronomy. ECS provides you with access to high-precision time reference NTP servers. NTP servers at ntp.cloud.aliyuncs.com provide an atomic clock reference service based on region. Atomic clock reference service uses very stable atomic clocks that are hosted by satellites, and are the primary standard for measuring time. By deploying NTP servers in different regions, the atomic clock reference service is easily accessible. International Atomic Time (TAI) is based on the atomic clocks housed in satellites, which are unaffected by network latency caused by different regions. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is derived from TAI, and both standards are accurate to the microsecond. The time difference between ECS instances deployed in different regions is controlled to within a few milliseconds, which improves the service reliability of multi-region clusters.