What’s the context for this? Seems like it’s a marketing piece to get people to sign up for their fake scarcity early access program. Very little interesting in the article.
You can't possibly have read the article.
A Scheduler for the Internet
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. ?????????????????????????
Because many decades of stability based upon simplicity are not good enough for today's world.
I don't really get into this argument anymore - I'm convinced opinions like this are held tighter than religion or politics.
Here are a few thoughts, written by others, that I would probably bring up if I wanted to get into this argument:
https://medium.com/eshares-blog/why-you-shouldnt-use-cron-jo...
https://engblog.nextdoor.com/we-don-t-run-cron-jobs-at-nextd...
https://medium.com/videoamp/what-we-learned-migrating-off-cr...
https://medium.com/@rbahaguejr/airflow-a-beautiful-cron-alte...
As a point of reference, I run a company that brokers terabytes of mission critical data each month for our customers. I've advised dozens of companies on how to properly ensure scheduled jobs are maintainable, instrumented, logged, and reliable. The defenses I've heard for "professional" software and systems engineers using cron in production software are appalling and I find the behavior negligent and to be a terminable offense.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. Tools have been created to that orchestrate automation with more powerful capabilities, and Airflow has become a defacto standard in the industry. Prefect is an open automation tool, comparable in a lot of ways to Airflow. The author of the post is an early committer to Airflow.
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. ?????????????????????????
Look, don't get me wrong, cron is a super useful tool for doing system-level tasks on a schedule but "grep a timestamp and run a program if it matches" is practically the definition of "doesn't scale."
Unless you code it yourself in your program cron doesn't...
- understand dependencies
- run jobs across multiple hosts
- handle errors (e.g. if err run this)
- do any branching whatsoever
- handle timespecs with more granularity than 1m
- do any reporting (mail counts-ish but if you're telling me you have an email based automation flow I won't believe you)
- do any metrics collection
- run pools of jobs
- understand priorities
- allow you to queue jobs
The value prop of things like airflow is that they factor all this logic out of your applications. At the point where you need these things "run a thing at a specific time" is the most trivial part.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because many decades of stability based upon simplicity are not good enough for today's world.
I don't really get into this argument anymore - I'm convinced opinions like this are held tighter than religion or politics. Here are a few thoughts, written by others, that I would probably bring up if I wanted to get into this argument: https://medium.com/eshares-blog/why-you-shouldnt-use-cron-jo... https://engblog.nextdoor.com/we-don-t-run-cron-jobs-at-nextd... https://medium.com/videoamp/what-we-learned-migrating…
[deleted]
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. ?????????????????????????
Look, don't get me wrong, cron is a super useful tool for doing system-level tasks on a schedule but "grep a timestamp and run a program if it matches" is practically the definition of "doesn't scale." Unless you code it yourself in your program cron doesn't... - understand dependencies - run jobs across multiple hosts - handle errors (e.g. if err run this) - do any branching whatsoever - handle timespecs with more g…
I think you should write their homepage as your comment is much more informative.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#16I don't really understand. What could I do with this that I couldn't do with cron? Or is it that somebody who can't use cron could use this? Or that this is more reliable than cron?
this appears to handle interdependencies / multi machine / in-application hooks
you could create some cron framework + glue code that accomplishes the same thing, but that would be alot of code.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. ?????????????????????????
Look, don't get me wrong, cron is a super useful tool for doing system-level tasks on a schedule but "grep a timestamp and run a program if it matches" is practically the definition of "doesn't scale." Unless you code it yourself in your program cron doesn't... - understand dependencies - run jobs across multiple hosts - handle errors (e.g. if err run this) - do any branching whatsoever - handle timespecs with more g…
> - understand priorities
> - allow you to queue jobs
technically this can be done oldschool with cron+at/batch.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#18What’s the context for this? Seems like it’s a marketing piece to get people to sign up for their fake scarcity early access program. Very little interesting in the article.
You can't possibly have read the article.
Your comment is in violation of HN guidelines.
All I saw is a marketing piece designed to tell me about the product line of a company I’d never heard of. No context as to things I could relate to, mostly just information and excitement about this prefect platform.
Outside of prefects products and features, what is the information you took away from this article that made it worth your time?
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production grade automation. ?????????????????????????
Look, don't get me wrong, cron is a super useful tool for doing system-level tasks on a schedule but "grep a timestamp and run a program if it matches" is practically the definition of "doesn't scale." Unless you code it yourself in your program cron doesn't... - understand dependencies - run jobs across multiple hosts - handle errors (e.g. if err run this) - do any branching whatsoever - handle timespecs with more g…
Then it's the wrong comparison, because cron simply schedules other commands, it's not a programming language.
Re: A Scheduler for the Internet
#20Yeah, this introduction/launch needs a lot of work. I've read over the first paragraph or two and all I see is buzzwords: "turn-key", "orchestration", "cloud", etc...
If you can't explain your value proposition simply and concisely so anyone that is not familiar with your product ecosystem can understand, you have a big problem in your hands.
This product seems like a simple scheduling tool, but your marketing jargon fluff piece says otherwise.