how do you deploy a cron script in production?

i would like to write a script that schedules various things throughout the day. unfortunately it will do > 100 different tasks a day, closer to 500 and could be up to 10,000 in the future.

All the tasks are independent in that you can think of my script as a service for end users who sign up and want me to schedule a task for them. so if 5 ppl sign up and person A wants me to send them an email at 9 am, this will be different than person B who might want me to query an api at 10:30 pm etc.

now, conceptually I plan to have a database that tells me what each persons task will be and what time they asked to schedule that task and the frequency. once a day I will get this data from my database so I have an up-to-date record of all the tasks that need to be executed in the day

running them through a loop I can create channels that can execute timers or tickers for each task.

the question I have is how does this get deployed in production to, for example google app engine? since those platforms are for Web servers I'm not sure how this would work...Or am I supposed to use Google Compute Engine and have it act as a computation for 24 hours? Can google compute engine even make http calls?

also if I have to have say 500 channels in go open 24 hrs a day, does that count as 500 containers in google app engine? I imagine that will get very costly quickly, despite what is essentially a very low cost product.

so again the question comes back to, how does a cron script get deployed in production?

any help or guidance will be greatly appreciated as I have done a lot of googling and unfortunately everything leads back to a cron scheduler that has a limit of 100 tasks in google app engine...

Details about cron operation on GAE can be found here.

The tricky portion from your prospective is that updating the cron configuration is done from outside the application, so it's at least difficult (if not impossible) to customize the cron jobs based on your app user's actions.

It is however possible to just run a generic cron job (once a minute, for example) and have that job's handler read the users' custom job configs and further generate tasks accordingly to handle them. Running ~10K tasks per day is usually not an issue, they might even fit inside the free app quotas (depending on what the tasks are actually doing).

The same technique can be applied on a regular Linux OS (including on a GCE VM). I didn't yet use GCE, so I can't tell exactly if/how would a dynamically updated cron be possible with it.

You only need one cron job for your requirements. This cron job can run every 30 minutes - or once per day. It will see what has to be done over the next period of time, create tasks to do it, and add these tasks to the queue.

It can all be done by a single App Engine instance. The number of instances you need to execute your tasks depends, of course, on how long each task runs. You have a lot of control over running the task queue.