[Clockwork-developers] Implementation of a decentralized schedule

[Joel L. <jo...@lo...>]

Does anyone have any idea of how a decentralized schedule might be
implemented? Shawn D. mentioned that the monitoring could be done with a
central server that all the clients periodically report their job status to.

But I was thinking about how the jobs flows would work. Assuming that each
system already has its portion of the schedule loaded, it's easy to handle
a job that starts at noon -- the system just runs it at noon. But what
about a job that runs based on the success of a job on another system? If
there's no central scheduler, then the systems would have to report their
statuses to whoever had dependencies on them. This could make updating a
live schedule hairy -- you'd have to make sure all the systems got the
updates pretty quickly.

And even on the monitoring side, the data needs to be very current or an
operator might take an incorrect action. For example, if he thinks one
job is still running, he might delay or kill another job. But if that
information is out of date ...

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of not needing a central server
process and database (multiplied by two for redundancy), but I can't quite
figure out how to make this work without them.

-- 
Joel