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Awesome! So, this is a sponsored talk by MoveIt, the company we work for. We want to talk about Sidekiq Scheduler, which is a Sidekiq extension for recurring job processing.
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My name is Andreas, and this is Gianfranco. We work for MoveIt, based out of South America in Uruguay, and we’ve been growing. We have team members in Argentina and Colombia, and we also have an office in Austin. If you're in Austin, we’re always hiring, so feel free to check us out.
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So, let's talk about Sidekiq Scheduler, which is where it all starts. I'll leave you with Gianfranco now for a while; he'll explain a little more about what it is.
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Okay, let's begin with a couple of use cases. Back in 2012, we were working on a project that needed to daily fetch information related to credit level scores based on financial data and apply interest to Amplitude cards. Additionally, we needed to send weekly activity reports to various email addresses. The first approach we considered was to set up cron entries to execute scheduled tasks for these processes. We thought it was an original approach, but it came with certain drawbacks.
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So, what are the issues with cron jobs? To answer that, it all comes down to composability. Cron jobs require starting the Ruby interpreter for each run, and since we were using JRuby at the time, it took some time to start up and consumed more memory. If we have our own entry scheduled to run at, say, 3 p.m., it has to start a new process and consume some memory. There's no straightforward way to programmatically enable or disable cron entries, and computations must live outside the application's scope.
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Moreover, it's not a portable solution since it relies on the operating system. You can't stop the scheduler without affecting other cron jobs. Other issues include the limitation that cron jobs run at a minute level rather than at a seconds level, triggering duplicated tasks when deployed in a cluster instead of running only once. Despite these drawbacks, we did use cron jobs initially, but we also looked for alternative solutions.
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In 2012, we discovered a gem called Sidekiq Scheduler, which was designed to scale sidekiq jobs for a specific future time. While this wasn't exactly what we were looking for, we explored whether cron could integrate with the Sidekiq Scheduler. While searching for alternatives, we came across Rufus Scheduler, which allows you to use cron-like syntax to schedule tasks easily.
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We then came up with the idea of integrating Rufus Scheduler into Sidekiq Scheduler. After implementing this in 2012, we started actively using Sidekiq Scheduler in a project we worked on in 2013. Morton, who was maintaining the gem, eventually handed over ownership to us. As of 2016, we added support for ready jobs, allowing Sidekiq to act in sync with various external triggers.
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Now, using Sidekiq Scheduler is just like using Sidekiq. First, you need to declare a recurring worker with your defined worker class, which includes the Sidekiq worker module. This class must define the `perform` method. The schedule configuration can be placed inside the Sidekiq configuration file under the scheduled key.
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For example, in the configuration, you could set up a 'Hello World' job that runs every minute, scheduled to trigger when the current second is 0. When that specific time arrives, Sidekiq Scheduler will push the 'Hello World' job into Sidekiq. After that, you install the gem, and if you're using Bundler, add it to your Gemfile as usual, and you can run Sidekiq as normal.
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In the example we showed, we told Sidekiq to require our Ruby file containing the worker class definition. Every minute, Sidekiq Scheduler will enqueue the job, and Sidekiq will perform the job accordingly. Various scheduling types are supported, primarily based on Rufus, which also allows for different job types to be queued.
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The main purpose of Sidekiq Scheduler is to push jobs into Sidekiq, enabling normal processing. When Sidekiq Scheduler is required, it hooks directly into the startup and shutdown phases of the Sidekiq lifecycle, which we will explain shortly.
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During the startup phase, we fetch the configuration from the Sidekiq initializer and start the Rufus Scheduler. Rufus is a thread that iterates over all the scheduled jobs and invokes each appropriate Ruby block as needed.
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We then set up a scheduled job for every one of the configuration jobs. Each handler in Rufus ensures that the job instance was not previously pushed and finally pushes the job into Sidekiq.
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While implementing this approach, we encountered the challenge of managing multiple running instances at the same time. Initially, we found that the cron jobs were intended only to run on a single Sidekiq instance. However, once multiple nodes were up, they could only trigger jobs on one scheduled instance. To solve this, we later extended support for multiple nodes for both cron and other job types.
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Now, it is indeed possible to run multiple Sidekiq Scheduler instances, like cron and other types of jobs. So if you have a setup with multiple Sidekiq instances, the tasks will not interfere with each other. We have also put in some mechanisms to avoid conflicts.
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Alright, let’s discuss the future of Sidekiq Scheduler. One of the main things we want to do is to stop polluting the global Sidekiq configuration. Right now, we load the configuration into the Sidekiq configuration file. However, if Sidekiq tries to perform other duties, we run the risk of a collision.
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Our goal is to prevent such issues by ensuring that every scheduling type can work across multiple instances seamlessly. We also want to maintain the focus of Sidekiq Scheduler purely on the scheduling aspect without invading other functionalities.
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Continuing from there, we plan to implement functionalities that improve our secure scaling abilities. Importantly, we aim to optimize our codebase and project structure for better organization.
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As a practical example, we wanted to introduce a feature that automatically closes stale issues in open-source repositories. If an issue appears inactive after a specified period, like a month or two, we will want the system to automatically close it.
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In our tests, we created a small code segment to mark duplicate issues. The created task runs every minute, checks the marked issues, and closes those that meet the criteria. Now, let’s demonstrate how it works.
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You can check it on the homepage of Sidekiq Scheduler and you’ll see our cron job there for issue cleanup. It runs every minute. As you can see, it will find those issues and close them automatically if they are marked as stale.
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Eventually, if no one shows any activity on these issues for a few months, the job will run again and will check, closing the stale ones accordingly.
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As a bonus for our talk, we wanted to showcase what it takes to write a Sidekiq extension. In the Sidekiq lifecycle, there are specific events you can hook into. We utilize startup and shutdown events to manage configuration settings, like starting the Rufus Scheduler.
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One important point to note is that when you run the web extension for Sidekiq Scheduler, you can create a customizable dashboard showing currently queued jobs. It also allows you to disable those jobs without needing to log into the server directly.
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To achieve this, you just need to create a module extension with a method that defines the hooks for it. You also need to register the extension in Sidekiq to enable adding the dashboard tab easily. You can define actions to render the necessary data in that tab.
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Additional features include the option to add multiple languages support for Sidekiq Scheduler. This makes it beneficial for projects of diverse user demographics.
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Lastly, let’s discuss contributions and collaboration. Since Sidekiq Scheduler is an open-source project, it has existed for quite some time and has had around 43 contributors over the years. Currently, we are dedicating approximately six hours a week to fixing issues and improving the scheduler.
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We appreciate all feedback and contributions from the community. Additionally, we maintain other open-source libraries. For instance, Rusyn is a simple exception notification gem for logging and sending errors in Ruby applications.
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We also have Ruie, a lightweight rules evaluator for conditional expressions, and Angus, a REST-like API framework that generates documentation while you write. Lastly, we created Fake It, an Android data generator for creating realistic test data.
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Thank you very much for your attention, and we hope you find Sidekiq Scheduler and these other projects useful!
