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AirBNB Opensources Chronos, a Cron Replacement

Posted by Unknown on from the end-of-time dept.

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.

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Keep it simple, stupid by manu0601 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Unnecessary. by viperidaenz · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. Where do I start ... by recrudescence · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Chronos, and Apache License thoughts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.