Unreliable Town Clock Is Now Using AWS Lambda Scheduled Functions

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon has announced the ability to schedule AWS Lambda function invocations using cron syntax. Yay!

I’m happy to announce that the The Unreliable Town Clock is now using this functionality behind the scenes to send the chime messages to the public SNS topic every quarter hour, in both us-east-1 and us-west-1.

No significant changes should be perceived by the hundreds of subscribers to the Unreliable Town Clock public SNS topic.

If you are already using the Unreliable Town Clock, what should you do?

The Unreliable Town Clock is a community published service that was intended as a stop-gap measure to fill some common types of AWS Lambda scheduling needs, while we waited for Amazon to produce the official, reliable Lambda cron scheduling.

The Unreliable Town Clock was originally built using simple, mostly-but-not-entirely reliable AWS services, and is monitored and supported by one individual (me).

The Unreliable Town Clock should be much less unreliable now that it is using AWS Lambda Scheduled Functions. However, there is still the matter of one individual managing the AWS account and the code between Lambda scheduling and the SNS topic.

I encourage everybody to start using the AWS Lambda Scheduled Functions directly. It’s easy to set up and has Amazon’s reliability and support behind it.

I intend to keep the Unreliable Town Clock running indefinitely since folks are already using it and depending on it, but I would again encourage you to move from the Unreliable Town Clock to direct AWS functionality at your convenience.