Oh! I have always been confused by that metric in the past. This is a really helpful illustration of it in practice.
As far as Malaysia, the VM that’s in the pool is mostly seeing Malaysia but neighboring queries do make up a bit of it: pool.ntp.org: Statistics for 111.90.143.178
They make PTP available on new instance types in a few regions, and Malaysia jumped out to me as the one that doesn’t already have lots of public stratum 1 servers. I posted about it here a while ago: AWS Time Sync, now with (limited) PTP support
They don’t reveal a ton of information but from an earlier announcement about Time Sync, it seems like they have GNSS-locked PTP servers. I think there’s room for some academic debate about whether it’s really stratum 1 for a virtual machine that’s presumably a few steps removed from the GNSS receiver, but chronyd marks it as such and seems very happy with it:
chronyc> tracking
Reference ID : 50484330 (PHC0)
Stratum : 1
Ref time (UTC) : Sun Jan 05 19:55:57 2025
System time : 0.000000049 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset : -0.000000073 seconds
RMS offset : 0.000000176 seconds
Frequency : 14.522 ppm fast
Residual freq : +0.000 ppm
Skew : 0.223 ppm
Root delay : 0.000010000 seconds
Root dispersion : 0.000001145 seconds
Update interval : 1.0 seconds
Leap status : Normal