Chronos advantages over cron with a wrapper

[agrawal...@gmail.com]

In our firm we already have a batch scheduling software that uses cron based scheduling of jobs.  I am trying to understand should we retire our existing process of scheduling the batch jobs in favor of Chronos. I am not able to understand what advantage Chronos is going to give me? Please opine.

How our batch jobs scheduler works (for reference) ?

Job definition:

===========

Batch jobs are defined in apache config format. For example:

// python function to check if it is tuesday

checkIfTuesdayAndNotHoliday()

<job> 
    calendar: indian

    <dependency: arbitrary_python_code: checkIfTuesdayAndNotHoliday()>
    <command>  
       check availability of flight
    </command>

    <success: notify: email: agrawall/>
    <failure: notify: email: ops>
    

    <command>
       some command to book my flight
    </command>
</job>

<crontab> 00 17 * * 1-5 </crontab>

Batch installer script:

================

Users use this script to install (create schedule) the batches by giving the job definition file (mentioned in example above) to this script. 

By using our load balancing infrastructure these schedules are distributed to different machines in the cluster. Finally, installer script creates a crontab entry like below:

00 17 * * 1-5 /batch_executor.pl 

Batch executor script:

================

This script takes care of executing the batch job, each of the command in the batch job are again distributed to run on different hosts in the cluster (this internally uses our cluster load balancing infra, that internally uses something similar to mesos). This is the script that takes of checking the dependencies, rescheduling the jobs, retrying, notifying etc. 

Thanks