The Problem

For scalability or what not, we often feel the need to run scheduled tasks. In Azure, worker role is perfect for that. Get an infinite loop and sleep command going, and you get yourself a background worker.

The problem with that is, firstly, once you get serious and need some visibility to the previous runs, we're now responsible for creating the history log repository and all that ourselves.

The second problem is more obvious, cost! I don't want to run a worker role just as what essentially a CRON job.

The solution

Put the background job on the Web Role, have it exposed as a url for e.g. https://somesite/tick and have it triggered by a scheduled task/CRON job.

You could pay for a CRON service. But supposedly if you're reading this than you probably already have at least 1 Compute Role, and most likely a Web Role (instead of a worker role). If yes, then read on : I'm going to take you through how to create a simple CRON-like service on Azure.

Steps

1. Let's create our Background action endpoint i.e. https://somesite/tick

I use Asp.Net MVC2 so all I have to do is create a controller and have one single action like such:

public class TickController : Controller
{
   public ActionResult Index()
   {
       // do your background job here:
       // for e.g. check twitter
       // analysis
       // save analysis result into table storage
       return View();
   }
}

2. We don't want to manually trigger the background action so let's create a console app as a trigger.

Let's call this HttpTaskRunner.exe

internal class Program
{
   private static void Main(string[] args)
   {
       // get url that we want to hit from config
       // i.e. https://somesite/trigger/
       var taskConfigSection = (TaskConfigSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("TaskConfig");

       var taskUrl = taskConfigSection.Url;

       // create a webclient and issue an HTTP get to our url
       var httpRequest = new WebClient();

       var output = httpRequest.DownloadString(taskUrl);
   }
}

3. We need to deploy this to Azure, so let's include our HttpTaskRunner.exe along with its config into our Web Role project.

Don't forget to go to properties > Copy to Output Directory : Copy Always. This way the .exe will be packaged along for deployment.

4. We will need to automate running the HttpTaskRunner.exe. We're going to need to set up a Scheduled Task on the web role using Azure StartupTask.

So let's create a batch script, let's call this addScheduledTaskRunner.cmd.

net start "task scheduler"
net user scheduler SecretP@ssw0rd /add
net localgroup Administrators scheduler /add
schtasks /create /SC MINUTE /MO 1 /TN WariCheckNewFeed /TR %~dp0Widha.Wari.HttpTaskRunner.exe /F /RU scheduler /RP SecretP@ssw0rd

notes:

1. You only need the 3rd line if you need admin privellege to run the task
2. schtasks.exe is a Windows executable available on the Windows OS family which allows us to create scheduled task etc. Above we're setting it up so that the runner is executed once every minute.
3. %~dp0 is a special variable that will give us the application root\bin\any folder structure that you have underneath it.
4. /F is a flag to Force update so that if for some reason the role is restarted but not re-imaged, the startup task will not thrown an error.
5. A common gotcha in VS2010, it creates text file with utf-8 which will produce an invalid .cmd file. So let's just use a notepad and save it along side HttpTaskRunner.exe

5. Let's setup the Azure Startup Task that creates the Scheduled Task.

Open up the csdef file and the following:

<WebRole name="Widha.Wari.WebWorker">
    <Sites>
    <Site name="Web">
    ...
    <Startup>
        <Task commandLine="StartupTasks\addScheduledTaskRunner.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple" />
    </Startup>
</WebRole>

Note:

1. We need elevated permission to create scheduled tasks.
2. If you need some debugging tips on startup tasks, head over to Steve Smarx's Windows Azure startup task tips tricks and gotchas

Voila! Cron-like background job running on Azure Web Role!