Distributed CRON

It is relatively straightforward to turn any Cadence workflow into a Cron workflow. All you need is to supply a cron schedule when starting the workflow using the CronSchedule parameter of StartWorkflowOptions.

You can also start a workflow using the Cadence CLI with an optional cron schedule using the --cron argument.

For workflows with CronSchedule:

• Cron schedule is based on UTC time. For example cron schedule "15 8 * * *" will run daily at 8:15am UTC. Another example "*/2 * * * 5-6" will schedule a workflow every two minutes on fridays and saturdays.
• If a workflow failed and a RetryPolicy is supplied to the StartWorkflowOptions as well, the workflow will retry based on the RetryPolicy. While the workflow is retrying, the server will not schedule the next cron run.
• Cadence server only schedules the next cron run after the current run is completed. If the next schedule is due while a workflow is running (or retrying), then it will skip that schedule.
• Cron workflows will not stop until they are terminated or cancelled.

Cadence supports the standard cron spec:

// CronSchedule - Optional cron schedule for workflow. If a cron schedule is specified, the workflow will run
// as a cron based on the schedule. The scheduling will be based on UTC time. The schedule for next run only happen
// after the current run is completed/failed/timeout. If a RetryPolicy is also supplied, and the workflow failed
// or timed out, the workflow will be retried based on the retry policy. While the workflow is retrying, it won't
// schedule its next run. If next schedule is due while the workflow is running (or retrying), then it will skip that
// schedule. Cron workflow will not stop until it is terminated or cancelled (by returning cadence.CanceledError).
// The cron spec is as following:
// ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
// │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
// │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
// │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
// │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday)
// │ │ │ │ │
// │ │ │ │ │
// * * * * *
CronSchedule string

Cadence also supports more advanced cron expressions.

The crontab guru site is useful for testing your cron expressions.

Convert existing cron workflow

Before CronSchedule was available, the previous approach to implementing cron workflows was to use a delay timer as the last step and then return ContinueAsNew. One problem with that implementation is that if the workflow fails or times out, the cron would stop.

To convert those workflows to make use of Cadence CronSchedule, all you need is to remove the delay timer and return without using ContinueAsNew. Then start the workflow with the desired CronSchedule.

Retrieve last successful result

Sometimes it is useful to obtain the progress of previous successful runs. This is supported by two new APIs in the client library: HasLastCompletionResult and GetLastCompletionResult. Below is an example of how to use this in Go:

func CronWorkflow(ctx workflow.Context) (CronResult, error) {
    startTimestamp := time.Time{} // By default start from 0 time.
    if workflow.HasLastCompletionResult(ctx) {
        var progress CronResult
        if err := workflow.GetLastCompletionResult(ctx, &progress); err == nil {
            startTimestamp = progress.LastSyncTimestamp
        }
    }
    endTimestamp := workflow.Now(ctx)

    // Process work between startTimestamp (exclusive), endTimestamp (inclusive).
    // Business logic implementation goes here.

    result := CronResult{LastSyncTimestamp: endTimestamp}
    return result, nil
}

Note that this works even if one of the cron schedule runs failed. The next schedule will still get the last successful result if it ever successfully completed at least once. For example, for a daily cron workflow, if the first day run succeeds and the second day fails, then the third day run will still get the result from first day's run using these APIs.