Ask HN: How do you deal with task/job scheduling?

4 pointsjennoo2 comments

How do you handle recurring and time-based events in your software stack. Would you choose for a self hosted solution (i.e. Celery) or choose a hosted solution?

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My job scheduling needs are mostly based around Rails, and in that stack I've never found anything more useful than plain old cron. Everything else either is at the whim of the Rails server needing to remember to do something (and if it crashes, it forgets) or needs a complex infrastructure behind it (Redis/Sidekiq). And when it comes to "I want this task to run every day at 1am", I've found absolutely nothing that can perform that other than cron.

I hate using cron because it has its own set of problems, but it's been working for me every day for the past year and a half I've had it running in production. I just don't want to have to stand up a Redis (or similar) stack that's bigger than the web app it's supporting...

I manage my infrastructure using Salt, which can also be used to schedule jobs (both Salt and outside Salt jobs), see https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/jobs/index.html

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