Job Scheduler - Main Concepts

Main Concepts

There are many concepts that are central to almost every job scheduler implementation and that are widely recognized with minimal variations:

• Jobs
• Dependencies
• Job Streams
• Users

Beyond the basic, single OS instance scheduling tools there are two major architectures that exist for Job Scheduling software.

• Master/Agent architecture — the historic architecture for Job Scheduling software. The Job Scheduling software is installed on a single machine (Master), while on production machines only a very small component (Agent) is installed that awaits commands from the Master, executes them, then returns the exit code back to the Master.
• Cooperative architecture — a decentralized model where each machine is capable of helping with scheduling and can offload locally scheduled jobs to other cooperating machines. This enables dynamic workload balancing to maximize hardware resource utilization and high availability to ensure service delivery.