Synchronized Asynchronous Job Runner in Rust

When implementing web services, the need to run recurring jobs often arises at some point (e.g. for cleanup / maintenance, or state-sharing purposes). Depending on the setup, these jobs might either run on dedicated services, or on the web services themselves.

In this post, we’ll look at a basic implementation of a Job Runner, which synchronizes job runs between instances of the services (so we don’t run the same job more than once at the same time) and which executes the jobs asynchronously using tokio, which enables us to use async/await within the jobs.

It will be possible to register new jobs with a schedule for running them at the job runner. The job runner itself will simply check for jobs to be ran at a configurable interval and, when a job is being run, puts an entry for this job into a shared redis cache.

This redis cache is used for the synchronization between multiple instances of the web service.

We’ll go over the implementation step by step and at the end there’ll be a link to an example which shows how to integrate everything.

Implementation

First, let’s define a nice API for registering and running job. We’ll probably need some sort of context object to provide things to our jobs such as DB connections:

let job_context = JobContext { db_pool : db_pool . clone ( ) , } ;

Also, we’d like to define jobs and their schedule without much fuss, so let’s see how a Job trait could look like:

pub trait Job { fn run ( & self , ctx : & JobContext ) -> JobResult ; fn get_interval ( & self ) -> Duration ; fn get_name ( & self ) -> & 'static str ; fn get_sync_key ( & self ) -> & 'static str ; fn box_clone ( & self ) -> BoxedJob ; } impl Clone for Box < dyn Job > { fn clone ( & self ) -> Box < dyn Job > { self . box_clone ( ) } }

All jobs will need to implement this trait. It includes the job’s name and the interval it’s supposed to run on. It also returns the sync_key , which is the key within redis used to synchronize the run of this job between instances. We’ll also need to be able to clone jobs, so we also need to implement a box_clone method, which is basically just this:

fn box_clone ( & self ) -> BoxedJob { Box :: new ( ( * self ) . clone ( ) ) }

I haven’t found a nicer way to provide a clone for a boxed trait object so far, so this will have to do for now.

There are two custom types in the above snippet - BoxedJob and JobResult:

pub type BoxedJob = Box < dyn Job + Send + Sync > ; type JobResult = BoxFuture < 'static , Result < ( ) > > ;

BoxedJob is simply a boxed up job we can pass between threads safely. A JobResult is what we expect a job run to return and in this case, it’s simply a future returning a Result<()> , as we’re not interested in any return values, but only whether the job succeeded or not.

Alright, so let’s see how a concrete Job implementation could look like:

#[ derive(Clone) ] pub struct DummyJob ; impl Job for DummyJob { fn run ( & self , ctx : & JobContext ) -> JobResult { info ! ( "Running Dummyjob..." ) ; let ctx_clone = ctx . clone ( ) ; let fut = async move { let db = ctx_clone . db_pool . get ( ) . await ? ; db . execute ( "SELECT 1" , & [ ] ) . await ? ; info ! ( "DummyJob finished!" ) ; Ok ( ( ) ) } ; Box :: pin ( fut ) } fn get_interval ( & self ) -> Duration { Duration :: from_secs ( 6000 ) } fn get_name ( & self ) -> & 'static str { DUMMY_JOB_NAME } fn get_sync_key ( & self ) -> & 'static str { DUMMY_JOB_SYNC_CACHE_KEY } fn box_clone ( & self ) -> BoxedJob { Box :: new ( ( * self ) . clone ( ) ) } }

So in run we can use the JobContext within an async block, where we actually execute our job logic - we can execute any futures we like in here. It would also be possible to run something CPU intensive using spawn_blocking etc. The other methods should be self-explanatory.

With such a job, setting up our job runner is rather simple:

let dummy_job = DummyJob { } ; let job_runner = JobRunner :: new ( redis_pool . clone ( ) , job_context , vec ! [ Box :: new ( dummy_job ) as BoxedJob , ] , ) ; job_runner . run_jobs ( ) . await ?

We instantiate a DummyJob instance and a JobRunner , pass our redis pool and the above defined job context to it, as well as a list of jobs, which includes our boxed up dummy job.

The redis_pool and db_pool mentioned above are simple redis and postgres connection pools using mobc, but you can use any pool you like, as long as it can be safely shared across threads.

Ok, so this is the API we’re aiming for. Let’s start building the JobRunner .

pub struct JobRunner { jobs : Vec < BoxedJob > , redis_pool : RedisPool , job_context : JobContext , }

So far so good. The JobRunner holds the above mentioned redis pool and job context, as well as a list of Jobs. These jobs are a boxed trait object so we can use different ones in the same list.

The first function we’ll look at is run_jobs . This is the initial function call, which kicks off the whole thing.

pub async fn run_jobs ( self ) -> Result < ( ) > { self . announce_jobs ( ) ; let mut job_interval = tokio :: time :: interval ( Duration :: from_secs ( JOB_CHECKING_INTERVAL_SECS ) ) ; let arc_jobs = Arc :: new ( & self . jobs ) ; loop { job_interval . tick ( ) . await ; match self . check_and_run_jobs ( & arc_jobs ) . await { Ok ( _ ) = > ( ) , Err ( e ) = > error ! ( "Could not check and run Jobs: {}" , e ) , } ; } }

In this case, we’ll first announce the registered jobs, logging them and their running interval. Then, we check if a job needs to be executed in a pre-defined interval.

This interval controls how exact our scheduling is going to be. For example, if we check for pending job runs every 2 minutes, it won’t make sense to schedule a job every 30 seconds. In general, if it’s not particularly critical that jobs are run at a very specific time, turning this interval time up is a good idea, as it will execute less often and hence have less of an impact on your service’s runtime performance.

Anyway, every $interval seconds, we call check_and_run_jobs , which we’ll look at next.

async fn check_and_run_jobs ( & self , arc_jobs : & Arc < & Vec < BoxedJob > > ) -> Result < ( ) > { let jobs = arc_jobs . clone ( ) ; for job in jobs . iter ( ) { match self . check_and_run_job ( job , & self . redis_pool ) . await { Ok ( _ ) = > ( ) , Err ( e ) = > error ! ( "Error during Job run: {}" , e ) , } ; } Ok ( ( ) ) }

In this function, we iterate all registered jobs and call check_and_run_job for each one of them. What’s interesting here is that we moved our list of jobs inside of an Arc , in order to be able to safely share the jobs between threads during iteration.

One thing you might notice here, is that we iterate one job after the other. Depending on the use-case, it might make sense to run the check_and_run_job calls concurrently with something like try_join_all .

Anyway, for each job, we do the following:

async fn check_and_run_job ( & self , job : & BoxedJob , redis_pool : & RedisPool ) -> Result < ( ) > { let now = Utc :: now ( ) . timestamp ( ) as u64 ; let j = job . box_clone ( ) ; let job_context_clone = self . job_context . clone ( ) ; match cache :: get_str ( & redis_pool , job . get_sync_key ( ) ) . await { Ok ( v ) = > { let last_run = v . parse :: < u64 > ( ) . map_err ( | _ | ParseLastJobRunError ( v ) ) ? ; if now > job . get_interval ( ) . as_secs ( ) + last_run { self . set_last_run ( now , & redis_pool , job . get_sync_key ( ) ) . await ; self . run_job ( j , job_context_clone ) ; } } Err ( _ ) = > { self . set_last_run ( now , & redis_pool , job . get_sync_key ( ) ) . await ; self . run_job ( j , job_context_clone ) ; } } ; Ok ( ( ) ) }

Ok, now it’s getting a lot more interesting. First, we check the shared redis cache, if we already have an entry for this job, if not, we run the job and set the last_run_date to now. If we do have a value, we check if it’s time to run it ( now needs to be greater than last_run + job_interval ). If it is, we run it, otherwise we bail and try again later.

The set_last_run method simply writes the last run time to the shared redis-cache.

Running the job itself isn’t particularly exciting:

fn run_job ( & self , job : BoxedJob , job_context : JobContext ) { let job_name = job . get_name ( ) ; tokio :: spawn ( async move { info ! ( "Starting Job {}..." , job_name ) ; match job . run ( & job_context ) . await { Ok ( _ ) = > info ! ( "Job {} finished successfully" , job_name ) , Err ( e ) = > error ! ( "Job {} finished with error: {}" , job_name , e ) , } ; } ) ; }

Because we are using the BoxedJob trait object, we can just call job.run with the given context. We do this within tokio::spawn , so the actual job is run on the tokio threadpool. After the job was executed, we also report success or failure using a log statement.

Alright. That’s all the infrastructure we need, now we can try and integrate this with an HTTP server. In our case we’ll just use plain hyper .

// first, define job context let job_context = JobContext { db_pool : db_pool . clone ( ) , } ; // then, instantiate the jobs let dummy_job = DummyJob { } ; let second_job = SecondJob { } ; // ...and the job_runner let job_runner = JobRunner :: new ( redis_pool . clone ( ) , job_context , vec ! [ Box :: new ( dummy_job ) as BoxedJob , Box :: new ( second_job ) as BoxedJob , ] , ) ; // set up hyper server.. let make_svc = make_service_fn ( | _conn | async { Ok :: < _ , Infallible > ( service_fn ( hello ) ) } ) ; let addr = ( [ 127 , 0 , 0 , 1 ] , 3000 ) . into ( ) ; let server = Server :: bind ( & addr ) . serve ( make_svc ) ; info ! ( "Listening on http://{}" , addr ) ; // run hyper and our job_runner concurrently let res = join ! ( server , job_runner . run_jobs ( ) ) ; res . 0. map_err ( | e | { error ! ( "server crashed" ) ; e } ) ? ; Ok ( ( ) )

So, we first define our job context with the db_pool we need in our DummyJob. Then, we instantiate the Job and the JobRunner, moving DummyJob and the JobContext inside the JobRunner.

Afterwards, we prepare a basic hyper server and run both it and our job_runner concurrently using join! . If any of them crash, we handle the error.

If we run this now, we can access the server and we can see the jobs running in the log. Also, if we run several instances (on different ports), we can observe that each job is only ran once for each interval.

The full example code including setup for the redis and postgres pools can be found here.

Conclusion

Running jobs on a web-server is an important use-case for a many projects and I found that for the amount of features this small implementation provides (redis-sync, asynchronous job execution, basic scheduling) it wasn’t particularly hard to implement in rust.

I’ve been using async/await and async rust in general quite a bit recently and so far, although it’s very new and the ecosystem is still maturing, it’s been a great experience. :)

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