[verelo]

This is brilliant! I've had to do a lot of work creating queue based systems in recent years, and i really like off the shelf solutions to problems like this. Cron is a great tool, but its a mess once you have a bunch of machines and it really just does not scale.

[bdunbar]

By itself it does not. If you have a bunch of machines, you also have a config system (right?) and they (puppet, chef and so on) have the means to manage cron tasks as a class.

You still get cron, and the means to manage them across one's servers.