My life would be a lot simpler if a crontab system database was added to the Name Service Switch. Then you could stick crontabs in LDAP or NIS. It wouldn't solve all distributed scheduling problems, but it would certainly help.
Take a look at a few of these:<p><a href="https://github.com/Yelp/Tron" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Yelp/Tron</a><p><a href="https://github.com/airbnb/chronos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/airbnb/chronos</a>