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Chronos and Airbnb

Florian Leibert

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The founder of Mesosphere, Florian Leibert has served the company as CEO for four years. Since receiving a bachelor's degree from International University in Germany, Florian Leibert has worked as a software engineer for a number of companies, including Airbnb.

While working for Airbnb, Flo Leibert helped to introduce Chronos as a replacement for Cron, the standard scheduler commonly used with Unix-based systems. Chronos is a fault-tolerant scheduler that runs on the Apache Mesos cluster manager. Unlike Cron, Chronos enables developers to trigger jobs by other jobs’ completions. It supports custom Mesos executors and the default command executor.
Before Chronos, Airbnb was using a single hourly Cron job to start its data processing pipeline. However, this pipeline was too complex, necessitating the advent of Chronos, which can automate more of the data processing. Chronos could, therefore, address problems that included variant network latency and virtualization, along with unpredictable I/O performance. In contrast to Cron, Chronos allows retries, provides an intuitive interface, and enables analysts to identify which jobs fail and succeed.