Distributed cron for Rails apps with Sidekiq Scheduler

We are heavy users of Sidekiq. Sidekiq is a Ruby background jobs processing library that uses Redis for storage and is widely used in Ruby on Rails applications. It has a nice ecosystem that allows extending its functionality with plugins.One such plugin that helped us run distributed cron, reduce maintenance costs and simplify our deployments is Sidekiq Scheduler. We will discuss the motivation for migrating from OS based cron to distributed cron using Sidekiq Scheduler and the benefits we get from it.