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Comment by wheelerwj | Hacker News Reader

so, i'm not a very good engineer so maybe this is a stupid question... but i am going to ask it anyways.

Cron is hard. Not in the sense that its challenging to set up but its a challenge to maintain and have visibility into. It seems like you need a whole set of infrastructure just to feel confident that things are running as intended.

This has always lead me down the path of building a task manager type of micro-service running on an independent server to manage everything. But by the time im done, it feels like over kill. I just don't know what to do differently. Am I missing something?

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Sounds like you might be better off using Jenkins than roll your own. I use Jenkins over cron when I want easier auditing & authentication. I got the idea to use Jenkins as a 1-size fits all hammer from https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/drop-cron-use-jenkins-instead...

Great to see I'm not the only one using Jenkins to look after crown jobs!

However, it's to me way more than simply auditing & auth. The main advantage I found with Jenkins are:

- you get a central place for all the cron jobs. That comes with all the advantages the most important one being nobody has to remember on which server is this freaking script

- making an update can easily be done

- running the task can even be done by non technical people.

- easy backup

- when a script become deprecated you can easily remove it and you're not very likely to let it there running for nothing forever

- easy documentation for you tasks

There's probably more but Jenkins is definitely awesome for cron jobs

I've done this many times in the past. Add an authenticated "cron" endpoint, and have a jenkins job curl it every X seconds. It's not perfect, but it's an easy way to see log, alert Pagerduty, etc.

Using a CI server as a scheduler? How is that at all the right tool for the job?

I've been burned by bad cron monitoring many times in the past. Short answer: check out https://cronitor.io/. Basically, finish every cron job by telling their server that the job finished. It's good enough monitoring for most cases.

Something like http://www.easybatch.org/ may provide quite a bit of the infrastructure you're looking for. I'm sure there are equivalents for other languages.

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