Comment by languagehacker
2 days ago
If Celery seems like overkill for your process, and you're really just looking to execute basic cron functioanlity, then why not just use crontab to invoke your Python script?
I can think of two major ways to operationalize a Python script that needs to run continuously. One is with containerization, which usually means Kubernetes, which already has a perfectly fine resource definition for cronjobs. The other approach is to run the script in a bare metal or VM, which would mean defining a service to ensure that the process can be managed appropriately, restarted if it dies, and the like. In other words, defining a service is about just as much effort as defining a cronjob, and there's no escape from some amount of "ops work" that isn't encapsulated in a Python script.
So why not just use the tried-and-true prior art than worry about building and supporting your own secret third thing that others would need to learn, support, maintain, and keep in mind when debugging a problem?
Fair point. Cron works fine for standalone scripts. This is more for when you want scheduled tasks inside an existing Python app without spinning up separate infrastructure.