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[The Hub] Job Scheduler in The Hub

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Grew up at the height of mainframes. Having some difficulty with the lack of structure maintenance in the “this new environment” … So – basic ability in The Hub / Hosting environment that allow me to schedule back-up, then update of plugins, with a test of the landing page afterwards to make sure all applied correctly, and then report. If fail, revert to backup. Should include any time based actions within the WPMU DEV Stack, so that I can have structured maintenance schedules for the week / month.

Tue, 1 Jun 2021 10:46:33
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  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Ockert !

    First of all:

    Grew up at the height of mainframes.

    Kudos for that! Must have been interesting times! Did you do any COBOL development and if so – is it really as bad as the popular opinion paints it to be?

    As for the request, have you tried Automate? It’s in the Plugins & Themes section for each site in the Hub and it does exactly that. You can set up a schedule for it as well to match your needs and it has email reports as well. Please check and see if that’s what you’re looking for or if it’s missing any specific features that you’d like to see.

    Kind regards,
    Pawel

  • Ockert
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Hi Pawel,
    Loved COBOL – later years even wrote COBOL real-time interpreter for Telxon scanners and tablets. Yes, they had tablets LONG before Jobs came around. My challenge with AUTOMATE is that you don’t have much workflow control. If the full stack is deployed within the WPMU hosting environment, and the Hub is active including AUTOMATE, the plugins should auto-sense this and delegate all scheduling activities to the Job Scheduler. The Job Scheduler should provide workflow capabilities, and perhaps even publish the job back into the specific instance cron for execution so as not to tax the monitoring environment. key is the ability to have functionality for tests before and after execution steps. I would like to see the process create or update a STAGING UPDATE instance, apply the changes / workflow steps, make sure it was successful, and only then execute in the production environment. So Friday night / Saturday morning run staging update test, if all is well, run production update on Sunday night / Monday morning when the site is not active. one can even then switch the site to “maintenance mode” for the update so that there is no interference. once the updates done, runcheck on database, clean database, and bring site back up.
    Using AUTOMATE, but over and above plugin updates, log files in Defender needs to be cleared, Hummingbird db cleanups, etc, all in different places and plugins. I think having a “single console” for maintenance and updates would further differentiate your offering from others.
    Regards
    Ockert.

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hi Ockert !

    Loved COBOL – later years even wrote COBOL real-time interpreter for Telxon scanners and tablets. Yes, they had tablets LONG before Jobs came around.

    Wow, so it’s contrary to the popular opinion! I’ve never checked it except some basic articles without access to anything that would run it. Looked complex on first glance, like a mix of high and low level stuff at the same time.

    I love the idea of the scheduler! That said, it also seems like a very complex undertaking to introduce it in the Hub, especially that it’s going across multiple features. For now, I’ll share your ideas with the Hub team for further consideration, we’ll see what they can come up with and if there’s anything they see that could be implemented from that, at least partially in the foreseeable future. We’ll keep you updated here with any feedback regarding this :)

    Right now the Hub team is hard at work on the Client Billing which will be a new full-featured part of the Hub soon, allowing members to basically run an agency through our systems and resell products and services, so it’s a major task that needs to be tested and released to free up some hands for other improvements :)

    Kind regards,
    Pawel