Discussion: Scheduled jobs that do not silently fail
Entries
The article pushes towards systemd timers, but cron's ubiquity and simplicity are features: a crontab line is understood by every operator and works identically on every Unix, in containers without systemd, and on hosts where systemd is absent. Timers are better where their features are needed (dependencies, persistence, journal logging); presenting them as the general replacement goes too far.
For the overlap problem, `flock -n /run/lock/job.lock command` is a one-line solution available on every Linux host, and systemd timers with `Persistent=true` catch up on runs missed while the machine was off — which cron never does. The article's monitoring point (alert on absence, not only on failure) is the one most teams skip.
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