With Cloud Scheduler you set up scheduled units of work to be executed at defined times or regular intervals. These work units are commonly known as cron jobs. Typical use cases might include sending out a report email on a daily basis, updating cached data every 10 minutes, or updating summary information once an hour.
Each cron job created using Cloud Scheduler is sent to a target according to a specified schedule, where the work for the task is accomplished. The target must be one of the following types:
- HTTP/S endpoints
- Pub/Sub topics
- App Engine HTTP/S applications
Cloud Scheduler is designed to provide "at least once" delivery; that is, the job will run at least once per scheduled execution. In some rare circumstances, it is possible for a job to run multiple times in association with a single instance of the schedule, so your code must ensure that there are no harmful side-effects of repeated execution. Your targets should be idempotent.
You can create cron jobs using either the Cloud console or the gcloud command line tool.
Supported regions by target
If your target is an HTTP/S endpoint or a Pub/Sub topic, Cloud Scheduler is available in all supported Google Cloud regions for Cloud Scheduler.
If your target is an App Engine application located within your current project:
A Cloud Scheduler job targeting App Engine can only be created in the project's App Engine region.
A Google Cloud project can contain only one App Engine app, and the region where the App Engine app is located cannot be changed once the app is created.
App Engine is regional which means the infrastructure that runs your app is located in a specific region. If you want to distribute compute and jobs across multiple regions, you should target an HTTP/S endpoint or Pub/Sub topic instead.
If you are not using App Engine as a target, you do not need to deploy an App Engine app, and you can disable any existing App Engine app.