Migrate cron jobs to event-driven architectures using Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon EventBridge

Introduction

Many customers use traditional cron job schedulers in on-premise systems. They need a simple approach to move these scheduled tasks to AWS without refactoring while unlocking the scalability of the cloud. A lift-and-shift migration to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is always a possibility, but that doesn’t take advantage of cloud-native services or scalability – they still have an always-on Amazon EC2 instance whose job is to wait for a specific time to start a task. Other services, such as AWS Batch or AWS Lambda may be able to fill the role, but may require refactoring the code and have other constraints that must be considered, such as 15 minute function timeout in AWS Lambda. Many customers choose to solve this challenge by moving their cron jobs to short-lived containers and scheduling them via Amazon EventBridge.

As an example, one customer had hundreds of cron jobs configured on a single on-premise server. They chose to run these various cron jobs as …