The other "simplest" way is to run the cron job on the web workers, and put something in the job to abort unless this host is the first web-worker instance. (Ot

The other "simplest" way is to run the cron job on the web workers, and put something in the job to abort unless this host is the first web-worker instance. (Otherwise your jobs would run multiply on each instance.) That's what we're doing to kick off scheduled tasks for Django and it works well. It'd be very messy if the scheduled tasks created load because backend load in the web layer would really confuse autoscaling, but ours don't. I'm also running little celery instances on each web worker, using Django as the backend. No SQS/Redis/RabbitMQ, no huge AWS lock in, no having to set up a backend worker layer. In general it's been fine for a year. You don't get good visibility into processing queue length etc but we usually have four bone-idle web workers so there is no queue length. If that might be a fit for your situation I could bang together a blog post or something.