JDK 8 comes with a new class, which is named java.time.Instant. Mainly, the Instant class represents an instantaneous point on the timeline, beginning from the first second of January 1, 1970 (the epoch), in the UTC time zone with a resolution of nanoseconds.
A Java 8 Instant class is similar in concept to java.util.Date. Both represent a moment on the timeline in UTC. While Instant has a resolution up to nanoseconds, java.util.Date has a milliseconds resolution.
This class is very handy for generating timestamps of machine time. In order to obtain such a timestamp, simply call the now() method as follows:
// 2019-02-24T15:05:21.781049600Z
Instant timestamp = Instant.now();
A similar output can be obtained with the following code snippet:
OffsetDateTime now = OffsetDateTime.now(ZoneOffset.UTC);
Alternatively, use this code snippet:
Clock clock = Clock.systemUTC();
Calling Instant.toString() produces an output that follows the ISO-8601 standard for representing date and time.