Sometimes I want to run the same cronjob on a few hosts but I might want to offset them slightly if I’m accessing any shared resources. Here’s an easy way to do that, for a small number of hosts, using Ansible…

- name: Ensure cron exists
  cron:
    name: Test Job
    minute: "{{ play_hosts.index(inventory_hostname) }}-59/5"
    job: /usr/local/bin/myscript.sh >> /var/log/log.log
    user: web

This would create a job, every 5 minutes, with a one minute offset compared to the previous host. So assuming four hosts we’d end up with the following cron job schedules;

hostname cron schedule Will run at minutes past the hour
host1 0-59/5 * * * * 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55
host2 1-59/5 * * * * 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, 41, 46, 51, 56
host2 2-59/5 * * * * 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, 27, 32, 37, 42, 47, 52, 57
host4 3-59/5 * * * * 3, 8, 13, 18, 23, 28, 33, 38, 43, 48, 53, 58

For larger number of hosts it would probably be better to group hosts and run the offset via that.