[ale] Cron Management

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 01/19/2016 08:48 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> These days a lot of folks are using things like Puppet or Ansible (which is
> now owned by RedHart) for central control.  I've not used them but they
> appear to have scheduling.


For really complex needs, people use Ansible to manage puppet environments. ;)
Both tools have their strengths.  I'd use Ansible to manage cron and scripts to
manage completion dependencies with "lock files" to prevent tasks from running
before they can/should.  Of course, judicious bash scripting would clean up any
of these files automatically (see Michael Porter's Bash Scripting presentation
for trap info).

I've worked at places with very complex orchestration requirements. They used
Maestro (it has been 15 yrs).  What I remember was the IT team always trying to
fix maestro stuff, then trying to fix failed batch jobs - every night. It was
sad, really.  Programmers would get called almost every night for "breaking the
batch" and have to manually hand-hold their job to completion.  It was common
for 30% of the development team to get called overnight because the inputs
weren't valid.

Yep. I'd use Ansible. Plus it looks good on a current resume. ;)