[josnyder]

I work for Yelp, and we use cron for purposes similar to those mentioned in this article, mostly synchronizing small bits of configuration or data that we want local to the machine. We're heavy Puppet users, and we made a module to assist us in the management of our crons [1]. If you're a Puppet shop, I highly recommend checking it out. It provides answers to each of the problems mentioned in the article, often using the same mechanisms. I especially like its integration with Sensu, which we use for monitoring the jobs.

We've found that deploying cronjobs onto individual hosts is quite powerful, and helps us fill a niche between configuration management tools (like Puppet) and specialized coprocesses (like Smartstack). We have cronjobs for downloading code deploys, showing Sensu state within the motd, reconfiguring daemons (especially the Smartstack ones), and (of course) cleaning up unused data.

Of course, there's also the separate problem of scheduling and coordinating tasks across an entire cluster. In most cases we don't use our cron daemons for this, although we do have some jobs that run on multiple hosts and enforce mutual exclusion by grabbing a lock in Zookeeper.

[1] https://github.com/Yelp/puppet-cron#puppet-cron