AirBNB Opensources Chronos, a Cron Replacement

First time accepted submitter victorhooi writes "AirBNB has open-sourced Chronos- a scheduler built around Apache Mesos (a cluster manager). The scheduler is distributed and fault-tolerant, and allows specifying jobs in ISO8601 repeating notation, as well as creating dependent jobs. There's also a snazzy web interface to track and manage jobs, as well as a RESTful API." It's under the Apache License as seems to be the fashion with businesses releasing software nowadays. It looks like it might be useful if you have to manage a lot of machines with interconnected recurring processes; I know I wish this had existed a few years ago.

Comments

Keep it simple, stupid

[manu0601]

This is not a replacement for cron. On an isolated machine, it would be foolish to trade cron for such a complicated beast. On many nodes, I understand it has benefits.

Re:Keep it simple, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some even simpler and securer alternatives:

http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/
"runwhen is a set of utilities for running commands at particular times. With these tools, you can perform calculations on time values in various ways, and use those calculated times to determine how long a process should sleep before performing some task."

http://ohse.de/uwe/uschedule.html

http://untroubled.org/bcron/
"This is bcron, a new cron system designed with secure operations in
mind. To do this, the system is divided into several seperate programs,
each responsible for a seperate task, with strictly controlled
communications between them. The user interface is a drop-in
replacement for similar systems (such as vixie-cron), but the internals
differ greatly."

http://www.superscript.com/trigger/index.html
"The trigger package contains tools for running programs on demand, invoked by external programs via data written to a fifo."

Re:Unnecessary.

[viperidaenz]

"distributed and fault-tolerant" and "dependent jobs"
All things cron doesn't do.

Where do I start ...

[recrudescence]

a) Chronos is actually correct (to the extent that the most accepted transliteration for the greek letter chi is 'ch' rather than 'kh') and means 'time'.
b) If anything, it's actually the Khronos group which should be cowering in shame, since they are misspelling the name Kronos.
c) Latin doesn't even have a 'ch' diphthong, except when transliterating Greek words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_%28digraph%29#Latin)
d) The latinization of Kronos would have been Cronus, not Chronos.
e) Strictly speaking, Kronos is a Titan, not a Greek God (except in the looser definition of Titans as deities in general)

Fail.

Re:Chronos, and Apache License thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a matter of fashion, it's a practical reality. No sane business wants to be the who defends the GPL in court. It'll be expensive and messy, and if the result goes against GNU/GPL "accepted wisdom", it will be a PR nightmare.

Nonsense. The GPL is rock solid.
You know how you can tell? It survived the heyday of Microsoft's monopoly without a court challenge.
If Microsoft was afraid to tangle with the GPL at the height of its power, you better believe smaller fish will have an even harder time of it.

No sane business wants to find out what the term "punitive damages" means when trying to violate the GPL for commercial gain.

Re:Chronos, and Apache License thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop spouting nonsense. Using GPL software such as a cron scheduler would in no way result in a company going to court.

Re:Unnecessary.

[kangsterizer]

Which is exactly why its not a cron replacement. Anybody who think this == cron had NO clue of what they were doing when they were using cron, and still doesn't.