Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

nerds.airbnb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#11

Post by tptacek »

I'm surprised there aren't more things like this, because Cron replacements are really valuable.

We wrote a small C program that serves as a scheduling daemon with Redis; we have a keyspace in Redis that can be used to schedule millisecond-granular periodic or one-shot tasks with a flexible "Chronic"-like specification syntax.

It is hugely more convenient and usable than cron. Once you have it, you immediately spot lots of opportunities to factor systems into scheduled jobs that you might have avoided doing if it meant you had to deal with cron.

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#14

Post by 3amOpsGuy »

Always happy to see more tools like this - the bigger the toolbox, the easier our lives are.

Of the various approaches I've had to depend on in recent memory, from perl scripts querying a central Db right through to eye wateringly expensive Control-M or Autosys in larger envs, It's plain old cron, fronted by config management (cfengine, puppet, chef, salt - it doesn't matter which) that has proven most dependable, easiest to train others on and simplest to debug.

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#16

Post by hendzen »

Interesting to see that this was built on top of Apache Mesos, a dynamic cluster partitioning framework started by some researchers at Berkeley [1]. So far I've heard about Twitter (and now Airbnb) using Mesos in production. Is anyone else evaluating or using it currently?

[1] - http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/papers/nsdi_mesos.pdf

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#17

Post by _harry »

hendzen wrote: post #16

Interesting to see that this was built on top of Apache Mesos, a dynamic cluster partitioning framework started by some researchers at Berkeley [1]. So far I've heard about Twitter (and now Airbnb) using Mesos in production. Is anyone else evaluating or using it currently? [1] - http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/papers/nsdi_mesos.pdf

Wired had a great article on Mesos that mentions Conviva also uses Mesos: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twi...

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#18

Post by codewright »

tptacek wrote: post #11

I'm surprised there aren't more things like this, because Cron replacements are really valuable. We wrote a small C program that serves as a scheduling daemon with Redis; we have a keyspace in Redis that can be used to schedule millisecond-granular periodic or one-shot tasks with a flexible "Chronic"-like specification syntax. It is hugely more convenient and usable than cron. Once you have it, you immediately spot l…

Don't suppose you could be convinced to release that scheduling daemon as open source, could you?

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#19

Post by zobzu »

so... cron's a 200kb self contained C program, super simple, does one thing, and does it well.

Chronos is built on top of frameworks, needs a few services to run.

Certainly it has value, but marketing it as a cron replacement is wrong imo. Chronos is one of these "web-server-service-tool" thingie, but no, it's not cron.

Re: Introducing Chronos: A Replacement for Cron

#20

Post by thezilch »

tptacek wrote: post #11

I'm surprised there aren't more things like this, because Cron replacements are really valuable. We wrote a small C program that serves as a scheduling daemon with Redis; we have a keyspace in Redis that can be used to schedule millisecond-granular periodic or one-shot tasks with a flexible "Chronic"-like specification syntax. It is hugely more convenient and usable than cron. Once you have it, you immediately spot l…

We've utilized a similar setup using https://github.com/benliles/TxScheduling (Python, Twisted Scheduling) backed by a DB store.
Post reply on HN