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Scheduled Cron Jobs With Render

Programmers often need to run some recurring process automatically at fixed intervals or at specific times. A common solution for this problem is to use a cron job. When you have full access to your own server, configuring cron jobs is quite straightforward. However, how hard is it to configure cron jobs when you use an application hosting service? Some services, thankfully, provide a way for you to do this.

In this article, we’ll walk through a sample mini-project that shows how to easily set up and deploy a cron job on Render.

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NGINX and HTTPs With Let’s Encrypt, Certbot, and Cron Dockerization In Production

Docker is a popular open-source containerization platform and it frees your hands to build your applications in development and production. In this post, I'm going to walk you through how to build a production-grade HTTPs secured Nginx server with Docker, Docker Compose, Let’s Encrypt (its client certbot). Let’s Encrypt certificates last 90 days and will need to be renewed after the certificate expires. So I will also provide details to script the renewal in crontab in Docker container.

1. Basic Example

In development, we need a basic Nginx container without HTTPs to fast setup our local test environment. I use Nginx official docker image and wrap up all the stuff with docker-compose.

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Build a Spring Boot App With Secure Server-to-Server Communication via OAuth 2.0

Most OAuth 2.0 guides are focused around the context of a user, i.e. logging in to an application using Google, Github, Okta, etc. While this can be useful, these guides ignore server-to-server communication where there is no user and you only have one service connecting to another. Thankfully, Okta is here to lend a hand with this area of application security.

The OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials Grant type is exclusively used for scenarios in which no user exists (CRON jobs, scheduled tasks, other data workloads, etc.). This flow is less showy than other OAuth flows as there is no end user or browser. However, this is far easier to understand than the more complicated, user-centric OAuth 2.0 grant types. In this tutorial, we'll walk through the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials Grant type and how you can deploy it for secure server-to-server communication in Spring Boot.

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What Is CRON and How Can It Help Schedule Cloud Workflow Jobs?

Introduction

Cloud Workflow presents a scheduler that allows you to automate the execution of a task over time. The corresponding schedule can be defined via a menu, where the user selects the necessary time expression or via a CRON expression.

This article explains what a CRON expression is and how to create a valid one for Cloud Workflow.

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Enterprise Use Cases for AWS Lambda

Last year we covered the top enterprise serverless use cases for AWS Lambda. To refresh our memory, according to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), AWS Lambda is most commonlyy used for REST APIs, multimedia/image processing, CRON jobs, and stream processing. Today, I’d like to cover some more complex ways some of our enterprise customers use Lambdas.  

During the AWS re:Invent back in 2017, Raghu Chandra, the Global Delivery Leader for Cognizant Technology Solutions, presented the six most popular use cases they implemented with their customers over the years. We’re going to look into three of them.