Ubuntu Koala food console gets its cron on

Scalr - the open source admin console for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and its Eucalyptus doppelganger - has added a cron job task manager to its arsenal, giving you more freedom to write and schedule scripts on sky-high virtual servers.

Like RightScale, Scalr provides web-based management console for so-called infrastructure clouds, services like Amazon's EC2 that provide on-demand access to scalable compute resources. Amazon now offers its own web interface, but services like Scalr and RightScale provide a few extras, and they dovetail with other, similar services, including Eucalyptus, the open source project that lets you mimic Amazon's setup in your own data center.

Eucalyptus is bundled with the latest Ubuntu. Thus the Karmic Koala tag. The NASA Ames Research Center is using Eucalyptus to build an infrastructure for federal government websites.

Cron jobs - scheduled commands or scripts - are typically tied to physical servers, Scalr founder and CEO Sebastian Stadil tells The Reg, and this can be problematic when you start scaling up your physical server to multiple virtual instances. The job could only be executed once per virtual server, and if a server failed, it couldn't be executed at all. Read more...