DevOps tools are rapidly evolving. Now that they've basically finished with machine provisioning, dependency management and orchestration, all major DevOps automation frameworks are going into managing reactive infrastructure. Enforcing a task schedule is just another form of state enforcement.

These are all pretty similar: - configuration management: ensure package oracle-java-8 is installed on machines A,B,C with this specific configuration. - orchestration: ensure my-awesome-java-app on machines A,B,C is running to databases on machine D,E,F - deployment with constraints: ensure that four instances of my-awesome-java-app are running on at least 2 physical machines with over 4TB free disk space. - job runner: ensure that script X runs on a cluster every __ minutes. when script X runs, send the output to script Y

I think that you'll see task placement and job scheduling primitives being integrated into DevOps tooling in the next 6-12 months.

Saltstack already has many of the primitives in place for building out reactive infrastructure, http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/runners/all/salt.run...

Would be great to hear about tools for Puppet, Chef, Ansible, other…