The Heroku Connect team ran into problems with existing task-scheduling libraries. Because of that, we wrote RedBeat, a Celery scheduler that stores scheduled tasks and runtime metadata in Redis. We’ve also open-sourced it so others can use it. Here is the story of why and how we created RedBeat.

Why We Created the RedBeat Celery Scheduler

Heroku Connect makes heavy use of Celery to synchronize data between Salesforce and Heroku Postgres. Celery is an asynchronous task queue that lets us schedule and queue jobs for execution by a background worker process. Over time, our usage has grown, and we came to rely more and more heavily on the Beat scheduler to trigger frequent periodic tasks....

Today we're happy to announce the availability of Heroku Scheduler. Scheduler is an add-on for running administrative or maintenance tasks, or jobs, at scheduled time intervals. It's the polyglot replacement of the Cron add-on, with more power and flexibility. And it's free; you just pay for the dyno time consumed by the one-off tasks.

A dashboard allows you to configure jobs to run every 10 minutes, every hour, or every day, and unlike the Cron add-on, you can control when. E.g. Every hour on the half-hour, or every day at 7:00am.

Polyglot Tasks

Tasks are any command that can be run in your application or even the Unix shell.

For Rails, the convention is to set up rake...