Quick PSA on using cron jobs with Google App Engine because it almost wreaked havoc for us.

App Engine has a lovely feature of having different versions of your app. You can upload a new version but not make it the default until you’re good and ready. We do this all the time for deployment. Deploy to a new version and try it out, then make it the default when we’re ready to unleash it. Often, we deploy to the new version a day or so in advance.

Cron jobs, it seems, are handled outside this versioning mechanism. If you upload a new cron.xml file, it’s active. Right now. Doesn’t matter if the version it was deployed in is the default or not. As soon as it’s uploaded, it’s the new cron-ness.

Where this almost bit us is that we added a new cron job in our most recent release (deployed yesterday but not active) to use a dynamic backend. As soon as the cron job got uploaded, it started running. I didn’t notice until this morning when our backend usage reflected the new cron job. Some quick research and here we are.

What this means long term is that cron.xml is no longer going to be deployed as part of our application anymore. It now becomes an entirely separate process. I’m a little annoyed that we have to wait until we pull the trigger on the new version before we can upload the new cron.xml but it’s a quick step.

Kyle the Mis-scheduled