Lilota is simple

Introduction

lilota aims to be simple. To understand what this means in practice, it helps to briefly look at the main classes involved.

Lilota (lilota.core)

The class Lilota is the main entry point used by the user. It allows tasks to be scheduled and workers to be started to execute those tasks.

Internally, it creates a LilotaScheduler instance and starts one or more worker processes. Each process runs a script that creates an instance of LilotaWorker.

LilotaWorker (lilota.worker)

LilotaWorker implements the worker responsible for retrieving scheduled tasks and executing them.

Multiple workers can run simultaneously. Each worker independently polls the database for available tasks. When a worker retrieves a task, it locks the task, preventing other workers from executing it. This ensures that each task is executed exactly once.

Workers can run:

• on the same machine
• inside containers
• on different machines in a distributed system

Communication between nodes

All nodes communicate through the shared database.

For many applications this setup is sufficient. However, some scenarios require horizontal scaling. In these cases, multiple Lilota instances can run across several servers. They still connect then to the same database.