Apache Chronos

Chronos is a distributed, fault-tolerant job scheduler designed to run on Apache Mesos, offering a robust alternative to traditional Unix `cron` for complex, large-scale environments. It enables users to define jobs with dependencies, run them as long-running services, or schedule them to…

Key facts

First appeared
2013
Category
technology
Problem solved
The core problem Chronos solved was the inherent limitations of traditional `cron` in distributed, highly available computing environments. `cron` is host-centric, lacks fault tolerance, cannot manage job dependencies across multiple machines, and is difficult to scale and monitor in a cluster. Chronos provided a way to schedule and execute jobs reliably across a dynamic Mesos cluster, with features like job dependencies, retries, and health checks, eliminating single points of failure.
Platforms
Linux (via Apache Mesos agents), JVM (Java Virtual Machine)

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Mesosphere (D2iQ) customers
  • Early adopters of Apache Mesos for data processing and batch workloads
  • Companies using the Mesos DC/OS platform