That's simple but consider "run something 4x per day but randomize a delay by hour so all of the 200 servers doing that task won't run it all at once"

In cron, you basically have to either use your configuration management to generate those times, or have a random delay script running before the command

In systemd timers, it's just

    OnCalendar=0/6:00:00
    RandomizedOffsetSec=60m

If you add

    Persist=true

[delayed]

> In cron, you basically have to either use your configuration management to generate those times, or have a random delay script running before the command

Nope. From crontab(5)

  The  RANDOM_DELAY variable allows delaying job startups by random amount
  of minutes with upper limit specified by the variable. The random  scal‐
  ing  factor  is  determined during the cron daemon startup so it remains
  constant for the whole run time of the daemon. 

[0] <https://stackoverflow.com/a/34815984>