Innovating Cron: Announcing Norc
Last week at Python NYC we open sourced Norc, a task management system that replaces Unix cron. At Perpetually we let anyone archive any web site on any schedule. One of the big challenges we faced early on was to create a flexible, traceable and scalable scheduling system to handle this problem. While cron is great, it’s not geared toward solving this problem: Tasks are tied to a single computer, and they’re managed independently for each host and user from the command line. In addition, with cron we’d have to build all sorts of infrastructure to handle error reporting, logging, etc. So there was a clear need for something better.