
A Scheduler for the Internet - jbredeche
https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/a-scheduler-for-the-internet-fd706336e2fe
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blowski
I don't really understand. What could I do with this that I couldn't do with
cron? Or is it that somebody who can't use cron could use this? Or that this
is more reliable than cron?

~~~
slap_shot
While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production
grade automation.

Tools have been created to that orchestrate automation with more powerful
capabilities, and Airflow has become a defacto standard in the industry.

Prefect is an open automation tool, comparable in a lot of ways to Airflow.
The author of the post is an early committer to Airflow.

~~~
ahbyb
>While cron is a nice tool, people should not be using cron for any production
grade automation.

?????????????????????????

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Spivak
Look, don't get me wrong, cron is a super useful tool for doing system-level
tasks on a schedule but "grep a timestamp and run a program if it matches" is
practically the definition of "doesn't scale."

Unless you code it yourself in your program cron doesn't...

\- understand dependencies

\- run jobs across multiple hosts

\- handle errors (e.g. if err run this)

\- do any branching whatsoever

\- handle timespecs with more granularity than 1m

\- do any reporting (mail counts-ish but if you're telling me you have an
email based automation flow I won't believe you)

\- do any metrics collection

\- run pools of jobs

\- understand priorities

\- allow you to queue jobs

The value prop of things like airflow is that they factor all this logic out
of your applications. At the point where you need these things "run a thing at
a specific time" is the most trivial part.

~~~
ahbyb
Then it's the wrong comparison, because cron simply schedules other commands,
it's not a programming language.

~~~
dragonwriter
Yes, chron is just a very simple, single-node, low-time-resolution, system-
level scheduler. While it may be good at that, that is very often (always
would be an exaggeration, probably) not a great tool to be used (at least as
an exposed component) in automation of modern production systems.

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brycesbeard
What’s the context for this? Seems like it’s a marketing piece to get people
to sign up for their fake scarcity early access program.

Very little interesting in the article.

~~~
wuliwong
You can't possibly have read the article.

~~~
brycesbeard
Your comment is in violation of HN guidelines.

All I saw is a marketing piece designed to tell me about the product line of a
company I’d never heard of. No context as to things I could relate to, mostly
just information and excitement about this prefect platform.

Outside of prefects products and features, what is the information you took
away from this article that made it worth your time?

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glial
How does this compare to Airflow? It's unclear from the website - can you
create DAGs (task sequences)?

~~~
slap_shot
This post is focusing on Scheduler, but the parent project, Prefect, has the
concept of Flows, which are similar to DAGs. You can convert an Airflow
project into a Prefect project.

One of their employees wrote about the comparison of the two:

[https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/why-not-
airflow-4cfa4232...](https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/why-not-
airflow-4cfa423299c4)

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sergiomattei
Yeah, this introduction/launch needs a lot of work. I've read over the first
paragraph or two and all I see is buzzwords: "turn-key", "orchestration",
"cloud", etc...

If you can't explain your value proposition simply and concisely so anyone
that is not familiar with your product ecosystem can understand, you have a
big problem in your hands.

This product seems like a simple scheduling tool, but your marketing jargon
fluff piece says otherwise.

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mrpotato
I would think that Quartz is more of a competitor than cron or Windows
Scheduler to Prefect Scheduler.

How does Prefect Scheduler compare to something like Quartz?

