Scheduling Jobs in Azure
Are you thinking about moving your applications into the Azure Cloud? Guess what is no longer there? Azure, at this time, doesn’t have any job scheduling technologies. Windows Scheduler and SQL Server Agent do not exist in Azure. Why? Because when you publish your applications in Azure you have no idea where it will be hosted. In fact, it can move from one server to another without your knowledge. In fact, that is the beauty of Azure…you don’t know and don’t care.
What you need, then, is some sort of enterprise scheduling service. In the old days we called it a CRON process because the jobs were most often executed at a specific time.
I started looking for open system software for job scheduling that would work in Azure and came across QUARTZ.Net. QUARTZ.Net is a port of the Java based application QUARTZ, which is a quite mature enterprise scale job scheduler.
The Dot Net version is already past version 2.0 having been upgraded to use .Net 4.0 Framework. It is hosted in SourceForge so the source code is available should you need to modify how it works, or more closely integrate it into your own software. I was disappointed that the documentation relies on the Java version at this time.
I would think hosting QUARTZ.Net in a WCF system in Windows Azure would provide an awesome scheduling infrastructure that would not only manage jobs for your entire environment, but would take advantage (if written to do so) of the scalability of your Cloud.
Are you using windows scheduling tools other than those shipping with Windows? If so, what tools have you found to add the most value? Drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org to share your experiences.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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