Maintaining a distributed system requires constant maintenance to ensure failures don't interfere with that system's reliability and availability. Using periodic scheduling and replication, site reliability engineers can minimize the effect failures may have on a system's performance. One way to automate this process is to utilize the system daemon, cron.
In this course, you'll explore how to use cron for task scheduling, the purpose, components, and operators involved in cron jobs, and the format and characters of cron syntax. You'll outline how cron works with distributed periodic scheduling and idempotency, and in largescale deployments.
Next, you'll review the PAXOS distributed consensus algorithm, best practices for its use, and how it applies to distributed replication. Lastly, you'll practice scheduling a cron job and using cron syntax generators.