How Slack Transformed Cron into a Distributed Job Scheduler
With help from Kubernetes, Golang and Kafka, Slack's crontab drives 2,000 tasks an hour. Monster Scale Summit had all the details.
Hasnain says:
“Adams’ takeaway? Use what you have. In their case, it was an existing job queue, Golang and Kubernetes. “You decrease the maintenance burden while getting huge-scale wins,” she said.
And even the lowly cron box held a lesson or two.
“Slack ran key functionality for 10 years on one node. That’s a long time to deal with this less-than-ideal system. But it was good enough. It got the job done. And I think that is really a key takeaway,” she said. “It’s okay to keep it really simple, even if it’s kind of janky, for a long time.””
Posted on 2025-03-16T05:43:49+0000