I wish more applications would adopt the "H" option that Jenkins uses in it's cron notation - essentially it is a randomiser, based on some sort of deterministic hashing function. So you say you want this job to run hourly and it will always run at the same minute past the hour, but you don't know (or care) what that minute that is. Designed to prevent the thundering herd problem with scheduled work.

I use fqdn_rand [1] in puppet for most cron jobs - it allows to run cron jobs at different time on different hosts (with different FQDN) but with the consistent interval between job runs. I would expect any modern configuration management system to have something like that.

[1] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/main/lib/puppet/pa...