Enable job scheduling – advanced options

Hello,

BTW, thank you for adding job scheduling by minutes in CNDS V8.3!

We are working with a strategic customer (Banking Industry) who has been an IBM SPSS Modeler user for more than 15 years.

With this customer we currently have an interesting opportunity for selling both IBM SPSS Modeler Server and IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services, those elements considering that at the medium term, they are keeping these services on premise.

Regarding IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services, our customer wants to deploy the solution for fraud prevention purposes, which is crucial from business perspective.

They have more than 200 IBM SPSS Modeler streams, and their main goal is to automate their execution in IBM SPSS CNDS, pointing to a couple of IBM SPSS Modeler Professional Servers whose workload is intended to be balanced via CNDS load balancing feature. They currently have an in-house development that launches the streams, with a tailor-made scheduling, but wants to migrate to a more robust platform like CNDS.

Some of the jobs runs every 30 seconds, every minute, on certain weekdays and others several times a day during a specific time window. e.g., from 11:30 PM until 03:00 AM next day, given production systems definitions.

Keeping those elements in mind, and current CNDS capabilities for defining job schedules, our customer kindly request to consider if it is possible to include in the platform as an Enhancement Request (perhaps for version 8.3.1 or later depending on your product development plan priorities) the following functionalities which will have a positive impact for end users (more than 20 at this customer) and which we suspect that are technically viable:

All applies while defining a Job Schedule:

1. Please Include for repetitions (recurrence pattern) an option to define intervals in seconds. Same concept included in version 8.3 for minutes, but in this case at seconds interval. e.g., this job runs every 5 seconds.

2. Please include in addition to the end date for the schedule, an option to specify “end hour” or “run until this hour”. g., this job runs daily until 04:00 PM.

3. Please include an option to select for which specific days the job is required to run. e.g., this job runs only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

4. Please keep in mind that previous three enhancement requests could be used in conjunction. e.g., this job runs every 5 seconds, on weekdays only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 1PM until 04:00 PM.

5. Please include an option where customer can specify legal holidays, or load them from a file, to have the context if current day is legal holiday or not because some jobs should or should not run on holidays (perhaps a checkbox may help).

In addition, we are constantly competing against SAS, AWS, Google and Azure at this customer, and we believe this enhancement may help us to protect our customer installed base.

After releasing CNDS V8.3, a workaround that we have explained to customer for this requirement, is using both job and stream parameters by adding some time, date and weekday validations directly in each modeler stream in order to direct stream execution to a "do nothing" node, or to the full stream, but this will requiere some effort to modify more than 200 streams.

Thank you and best regards.

Juan Olarte