Recently I've been experimenting with a rapid prototyping approach to system construction, where one starts off with a really hacky, messy, high-WTF-per-minute prototype, and progressively productionise it over time. The focus here is getting as much business value as possible within the first week or two, followed by significant time and effort to iteratively clean it up. Each iteration seems to provide more business value to the solution, albeit with diminishing returns over time.

Practically, I applied this to a recent data ingest project I was working on, and it had some pretty good results. In this post, I'll write a little about the project, the cron jobs and how I containerised them, as well as learnings I took from this process.

TL;DR: For those just wanting to know how to Dockerise a cron job, see the Dockerfile and the scripts. For those wanting a better approach to containerising cron jobs, see this section.

I recently built a prototype for a data ingest project that was made up of Python 3 and BASH scripts that were executed once a day. I slapped these scripts together in under 2 weeks, got them up and running on my laptop in my office (running Ubuntu) and ran the BASH scripts as cron jobs. The BASH scripts did a variety of things, including activating Python virtual environments, configuring some environment variables for the Python scripts, running those Python scripts, moving files around, and running commands like sftp . The Python scripts write their results to a PostgreSQL database running in our container environment.

The prototype came together really well - too well, in fact. People started incorporating the data from our PostgreSQL database into production applications before we could finish the next iteration of the system (largely due to staff churn and reshuffling in the company). This meant that we were forced to get the cron jobs on my laptop into a more reliable running environment (i.e. our orchestrated container environment) while we continued to work on the next iteration of the system.

Disclaimer: This is a Bad Idea#

Before I show you how I did it, I have to give the disclaimer that I would definitely not recommend using this approach for a production system. I'll talk about better approaches later on in the post, and why I'd consider them to be better (in the sense that the other approaches will save you a variety of headaches later on in the project's lifetime, especially when it comes to monitoring).

The Dockerfile#

Since I'm not really allowed to share the actual code I used, I'll share something similar that illustrates the mechanics. We'll start with the Dockerfile for the project:

FROM python:3.6-slim-stretch # We need cron, sshpass (to specify SSH passwords from files) and sftp RUN apt-get update && \ apt-get -y install cron sshpass openssh-client # Base directory into which to put our scripts ENV SCRIPT_DIR="/opt/ingest" # By default, the ingest's cron job will run at 8am every day (server time) ENV CRON_INGEST_SPEC="0 8 * * *" # Send out a mail at 08h30 (server time) with the last few hundred lines of # the ingest log. We played around with this number a bit, because this e-mail # job needs to run once the ingest is complete. Generally our ingest wouldn't # take more than about 4 or 5 minutes, so we gave it 30 minutes to be on the # safe side. ENV CRON_EMAIL_SPEC="30 8 * * *" # Which folder to use to save the logs ENV LOG_DIR="/var/log/ingest" # The ingest's log file ENV LOG_FILE="${LOG_DIR}/ingest.log" WORKDIR ${SCRIPT_DIR} # Copy all of our scripts into the container to /opt/ingest COPY src/* ./ # Configure SSH access for SFTP (so it doesn't ask to manually authorise # the host when connecting for the first time) RUN mkdir -p /root/.ssh COPY known_hosts /root/.ssh/known_hosts # Install Python dependencies and make log directory/file available RUN pip install -r requirements.txt && \ mkdir -p ${LOG_DIR} && \ touch ${LOG_FILE} # We'll be storing data in /opt/ingest/data, and we want the logs to be saved # across container restarts/recreation VOLUME [ "${SCRIPT_DIR}/data", "${LOG_DIR}" ] # We need to inject environment variables, since the cron job seems to ignore # any environment variables that are set by Docker ENTRYPOINT [ "/opt/ingest/entrypoint.sh" ] # Fires up cron as a background process, and makes the tail process the one # that keeps the container alive CMD cron && tail -f ${LOG_FILE}

The final CMD configuration comes from this StackOverflow answer. I personally couldn't get this one to work. As per that StackOverflow thread, the tail -f command isn't a great idea because it gives absolutely no indication as to whether or not something's gone wrong in your cron jobs. It does, however, do the job for a quick 'n dirty hack.

Building the image is pretty straightforward, as per most Docker images:

$ docker build -t ingest:0.1.0 .

The Scripts#

A variety of scripts were used to achieve our desired outcome. This is because of having some trouble getting our cron jobs to pick up our desired environment variables (one of the "best practices" for configuring Docker containers).

Directory Structure#

We had the following file/directory structure where we kept our Dockerfile :

Dockerfile

known_hosts - See this article. For us, this file contained the SSH fingerprints of the target SFTP server to which we had to push some processed data.

- See this article. For us, this file contained the SSH fingerprints of the target SFTP server to which we had to push some processed data. src/email_file.py - A custom Python utility to e-mail a file to us.

- A custom Python utility to e-mail a file to us. src/email_logs.sh - The script that is called by a secondary cron job to execute the email_file.py script with appropriate parameters/environment variables, so we get a daily log of how the cron job is faring.

- The script that is called by a secondary cron job to execute the script with appropriate parameters/environment variables, so we get a daily log of how the cron job is faring. src/entrypoint.sh - The Docker entry point. See this StackOverflow post. We used this to take our Docker container environment variables and inject them into the system in such a way that the cron job could easily access them.

- The Docker entry point. See this StackOverflow post. We used this to take our Docker container environment variables and inject them into the system in such a way that the cron job could easily access them. src/ingest.sh - The BASH script that would be run by our primary cron job.

- The BASH script that would be run by our primary cron job. src/ingest.py - The data ingest script.

- The data ingest script. src/requirements.txt - A list of the Python libraries on which our Python scripts depends.

I'll start with the entrypoint.sh script, as it provides a useful glimpse into how we inject our environment variables into the cron jobs. This script basically gets executed once as the container starts up, and it, in turn, executes our CMD commands.

#!/bin/bash set -e # Where to put the file that contains our environment variables ENV_SCRIPT="${SCRIPT_DIR}/env-vars" # Write out our SFTP password to a file echo "${SFTP_PASSWORD}" > ".sftp-password" # Write our environment variables script - the ${VARNAME:-defaultvalue} allows # us to configure a default value for an environment variable if it was not # injected into the container. # NB: It's NEVER a good idea to commit passwords to your VCS. Don't store any # sensitive passwords in here. Rather configure them as environment # variables for such prototypes (and then later look into software like # Hashicorp's Vault as an alternative to this approach). echo "DB_HOST=${DB_HOST:-postgres} DB_PORT=${DB_PORT:-5432} DB_NAME=${DB_NAME:-somedbname} DB_USER=${DB_USER:-somedbuser} DB_PASSWORD=${DB_PASSWORD:-somedbpassword} SFTP_HOST=${SFTP_HOST:-sftp.somehost.com} SFTP_USER=${SFTP_USER:-sftpuser} SFTP_PORT=${SFTP_PORT:-2222} SFTP_PASSWORD_FILE=${SFTP_PASSWORD_FILE:-\".sftp-password\"} EMAIL_RECIPIENTS=${EMAIL_RECIPIENTS:-\"sucker4@monitoring.com\"} EMAIL_SUBJECT=${EMAIL_SUBJECT:-\"Daily Ingest Log\"} EMAIL_LINES=${EMAIL_LINES:-300} LOG_FILE=${LOG_FILE:-\"/var/log/ingest/ingest.log\"} " > ${ENV_SCRIPT} # Activate the environment variables (just for printing, basically) source ${ENV_SCRIPT} # If we need to add another known host to the /etc/.ssh/known_hosts file if [ -n "${KNOWN_HOST}"]; then echo "${KNOWN_HOST}" >> /root/.ssh/known_hosts fi # Write out our crontab to a file echo " ${CRON_INGEST_SPEC} SCRIPT_DIR=${SCRIPT_DIR} ${SCRIPT_DIR}/ingest.sh >> ${LOG_FILE} 2>&1 ${CRON_EMAIL_SPEC} SCRIPT_DIR=${SCRIPT_DIR} ${SCRIPT_DIR}/email-logs.sh >> ${LOG_FILE} 2>&1 " > ${SCRIPT_DIR}/crontab # Install the crontab for root crontab -u root ${SCRIPT_DIR}/crontab # For debugging purposes, to make sure the crontab's been set up properly and # all of our parameters have been configured correctly (NOTE: I haven't echo'd # out any passwords here, for good reason: we don't know who has access to our # logs, and our logs are going to be e-mailed around). echo "Crontab for root:" crontab -l echo "" echo "Parameters:" echo " - SFTP target : sftp://$SFTP_USER@$SFTP_HOST:$SFTP_PORT" echo " - Database : postgres://$DB_USER@$DB_HOST:$DB_PORT/$DB_NAME" echo " - Email logs to : $EMAIL_RECIPIENTS (last $EMAIL_LINES lines)" echo "" # Execute the container's CMD commands exec "$@"

This script runs our primary ingest script, but first takes in the environment variables configured by our entrypoint.sh file and outputs a bunch of verbose logging to stdout (which, in turn, gets redirected to our log file, as per the cron job configuration).

#!/bin/bash set -e # Set our working directory cd $SCRIPT_DIR # Set our environment variables (configured by entrypoint.sh) source env-vars # Configure all of our parameters TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d` DATE_PATH=`date +%Y/%m/%d` DATA_PATH="data" PROCESSED_PATH="$DATA_PATH/processed/$DATE_PATH" FLAGGED_PATH="$DATA_PATH/flagged/$DATE_PATH" BACKUP_PATH="$DATA_PATH/backup" PROCESSED_BACKUP_PATH="$BACKUP_PATH/processed/$DATE_PATH" PROCESSED_BACKUP_BASE_PATH=`dirname $PROCESSED_BACKUP_PATH` # YYYY-mm-dd echo "-----------------------------" echo " Daily ingest for $TODAY" echo "-----------------------------" echo "Parameters:" echo " - SFTP target : sftp://$SFTP_USER@$SFTP_HOST:$SFTP_PORT" echo " - Database : postgres://$DB_USER@$DB_HOST:$DB_PORT/$DB_NAME" echo "" mkdir -p $PROCESSED_PATH mkdir -p $FLAGGED_PATH mkdir -p $BACKUP_PATH mkdir -p $PROCESSED_BACKUP_BASE_PATH echo "Fetching data..." ./ingest.py \ --backup-folder=$BACKUP_PATH \ --db-host="${DB_HOST}" --db-port=$DB_PORT --db-name="${DB_NAME}" \ --db-user="${DB_USER}" --db-password="${DB_PASSWORD}" \ "$PROCESSED_PATH" \ "$FLAGGED_PATH" echo "" echo "Copying data to SFTP server..." sshpass -f $SFTP_PASSWORD_FILE \ sftp -P $SFTP_PORT "${SFTP_USER}@${SFTP_HOST}" <<EOF cd processedfiles put -r $PROCESSED_PATH/* . EOF echo "" echo "Cleaning up..." mv $PROCESSED_PATH $PROCESSED_BACKUP_PATH echo "Done."

This script just sources our environment variables and then runs the Python script that e-mails us the last few hundred lines of our log file every day (quick 'n dirty babysitting-style monitoring):

#!/bin/bash set -e cd $SCRIPT_DIR source env-vars ./email_file.py \ --subject "${EMAIL_SUBJECT}" \ --max-lines ${EMAIL_LINES} \ "${EMAIL_RECIPIENTS}" \ ${LOG_FILE}

Here's a Python script whose source I can actually share, since it has nothing to do with the business logic. Note: This assumes no authentication against your SMTP server. To configure authentication, see the relevant Python documentation.

#!/usr/local/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import argparse import smtplib from email.message import EmailMessage def main(): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument( "recipients", help="Comma-separated list of recipient e-mail addresses" ) parser.add_argument( "filename", help="The file to attach to the e-mail when sending" ) parser.add_argument( "--subject", default="Here's a file", help="The subject of the e-mail when sending" ) parser.add_argument( "--smtp-host", default="smtp.mycompany.com", help="The SMTP server to use for sending mail" ) parser.add_argument( "--max-lines", type=int, help="The maximum number of lines to include from the end of the file" ) args = parser.parse_args() recipients = args.recipients.split(",") filename = args.filename subject = args.subject smtp_host = args.smtp_host max_lines = args.max_lines # first read the contents of the file with open(filename, "rt", encoding="utf-8") as f: file_contents = f.read() print("Sending e-mail to %s..." % ", ".join(recipients)) if max_lines: lines = [line for line in file_contents.split("

") if line.strip()] if len(lines) > max_lines: file_contents = ("Last %d lines of file:



" % max_lines) + \ "

".join(lines[-max_lines:]) msg = EmailMessage() msg['Subject'] = subject msg['To'] = ', '.join(recipients) msg['From'] = 'NoReply <no-reply@mycompany.com>' msg.set_content(file_contents) with smtplib.SMTP(smtp_host) as s: s.send_message(msg) print("E-mail sent") if __name__ == "__main__": main()

A Better Approach to Cron Jobs#

As hinted to earlier, I've found that a far better approach to containerising an application that runs on a regular basis is to build it in such a way that:

Running it involves the execution of a long-running script or application. No cron jobs here: just your application that gets executed and runs forever, or until a severe error occurs that kills the program, thus terminating the container and possibly informing your container orchestration software to send alerts and restart the application. Your application provides an API of sorts for monitoring. This way, your orchestration and/or monitoring software can regularly ping your application to see if everything's healthy, and send out alerts if not. Also, other applications that depend on your application can also ping the health check endpoints to see what's going on.

Our next iteration of our project was built using a variety of components from the Spring Framework (such as Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Integration, and Spring Actuator). Spring Integration and Spring Data provided us with the relevant ingest machinery we needed, where Spring Boot and Spring Actuator provided us with the RESTful API endpoints we needed to facilitate proper health checks and get insight into what's going on in the container.

If, however, I was to build the next iteration in Python, I would most certainly build it as a Flask application (to provide the web status API) that uses something like schedule to regularly run specific tasks.

Like anything in life, this quick-'n-dirty-first approach has pros and cons to it. The pros are clear in terms of their value-add, but if you ignore the cons and don't budget time for dealing with them systematically, you can really run into some trouble, and you may even tank your entire project quite spectacularly.

People could start getting a qualitative feel for the data itself. We didn't have much sample data to go on in the beginning, so having new data being imported every day really helped us think about what we could do with the data. People could query the data in a variety of ways. Since it was being imported into PostgreSQL, we could pull out meaningful statistics and identify potential problems in the data, helping us iron out some of the minimum quality assurances between us and our data provider. It helped us think more clearly about a better architecture for the production system. If I'd just started with the production system from the beginning, I would've probably had to go back to the drawing board several times when we discovered what we did from points 1 and 2 above. It saved us longer-term and larger-scale waste by making the system more pliable up-front, concentrating the waste in the prototype, which was easier to modify than the final envisaged production system would be. This may seem intuitive, but you'd be surprised at how hard it is to get bureaucratic organisations to buy into this approach. This is especially hard in organisations that insist on having tomes of architectural documentation, as well as a fully planned-out Gantt chart, prior to writing a single line of code.

What if something happens to me and someone else has to take over the prototype? If a system has a clearly defined architectural vision, is well-documented and the code thus far is clean, it's relatively easy for someone else to take it over. Unfortunately, these sorts of hacky prototypes are filled with all sorts of esoteric tricks to get them to work. For example, since I know Python quite well, I used many Pythonic tricks in the ingest script, where someone who doesn't know Python so well (or at all) would really struggle to understand what I was doing. Similarly with the BASH tricks I had to apply to get the various technologies to play nicely together in a relatively flexible way. (One way of mitigating this is to include links to the various StackOverflow/GitHub discussions on particular approaches to solving the problem at key points in your code, so someone reading your code doesn't have to reinvent the wheel.) It ran on my laptop. This is a troubling one, and somewhat overlaps with the previous point. Oftentimes, getting something running in a virtualised environment takes a lot of effort. For this particular project, I didn't have access to any simple virtual machines where I could get my cron jobs up and running (I had a container orchestration environment). Interestingly enough, my Ubuntu-based laptop ran the cron jobs successfully every day for 4 months, without ever needing to be restarted. It did pose a problem, however, since the next iteration in the productionising effort started taking a significant amount of time, and people started depending on the results of those scripts running on that laptop. The prototype often needs to be thrown away in its entirety, and you need to be okay with that. In certain environments (like large corporates), there are constraints when building systems. Such constraints include the fact that sustainability of the solution is often more important than using cool technology to solve the problem. For example, in the environment in which this project was being built, hardly anyone else knows the Python programming language, and most people are far more comfortable with Java. This makes a Python solution great for getting all the pros in the previous section, but completely inappropriate for a long-term solution that others in the organisation might have to maintain. Some people rebel against such overtly wasteful approaches, but my argument still remains that, had I started with the full-blown Spring/Java solution from the beginning, I would have created far more waste and it would've taken far longer to show business value. Deploying new features into the prototype is a heavily manual process. This touches on point 2 above to a certain degree. Even if I was running the scripts on a VM, what if there was data loss somewhere and we had to recreate the VM from scratch? I didn't have any automated deployment scripts/pipelines at this point, as there just wasn't time during prototyping for this. Worse still, what if someone else had to recreate the VM on my behalf, not having any clue as to what I did on the original VM? Tools like Ansible are excellent for automating deployment to VMs, but it takes additional time and discipline to rather make changes to Ansible playbooks as opposed to just SSH'ing into the VM and making the changes manually. I find that at this point, there needs to be a decision made on the tradeoff between adding new features to, and documenting, the prototype and investing in the next iteration of the productionising effort, because at a point, you start getting diminishing returns from the addition of features to the quick 'n dirty hack. Few or no tests at all. Many people will consider code without tests to be broken. To be honest, I did write a few unit tests for the prototype, but nothing to the extent that we wrote for the next iteration of the system. What the prototype did show us is the many ways in which the system could break, which was incredibly useful for informing the testing in the next iteration. This, however, requires that one babysit the prototype a lot more than one would a production system. Little to no coherent initial project plan or timelines. Again, in certain environments, like large corporates, they employ project managers whose performance (through no fault of their own, usually) is measured by way of how well they manage and facilitate the achievement of timelines. In essence, they seem to be rewarded for being able to predict the future, and then control the flow of project events to conform to their initial predictions. Despite the patent absurdity of this approach in the face of uncertainty, many companies still seem to somehow see value in this view of the world. This makes it really difficult to convince them to give you space for a few weeks to learn (which is usually the primary goal of prototyping) so that you can give them a better idea as to the effort involved in building the next iteration of the system.

While containerising a cron job-based prototype is possibly a good iteration towards a better production system (it's at least better than running the cron jobs on your local machine or on a VM without configuration management), it's still not a great idea for building a production system.

At a higher level, however, the approach of rapid prototyping in projects with even a moderate amount of uncertainty can yield really quick results, as long as one budgets for the additional iteration(s) it will take to produce a production system of reasonable, sustainable quality.