Managing cron jobs across multiple servers

Question

We are facing a problem with managing cron jobs over multiple servers with dependencies.

I hope there is an opensource central management project that I can be used to handle that and report the status of each job.

I found a project called chronos that runs on a top of mesos, but is there any alternative?

Answer 1

You can use ansible's cron module.

Here is examples for some cron jobs:

# Ensure a job that runs at 2 and 5 exists.
# Creates an entry like "0 5,2 * * ls -alh > /dev/null"
- cron:
    name: "check dirs"
    minute: "0"
    hour: "5,2"
    job: "ls -alh > /dev/null"

# Ensure an old job is no longer present. Removes any job that is prefixed
# by "#Ansible: an old job" from the crontab
- cron:
    name: "an old job"
    state: absent

# Creates an entry like "@reboot /some/job.sh"
- cron:
    name: "a job for reboot"
    special_time: reboot
    job: "/some/job.sh"