title: Scheduling A Job on AWS EC2
body: <p>I have a website running on AWS EC2. I need to create a nightly job that generates a sitemap file and uploads the files to the various browsers. I'm looking for a utility on AWS that allows this functionality. I've considered the following:</p>
  
  <p>1) Generate a request to the web server that triggers it to do this task</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I don't like this approach because it ties up a server thread and uses cpu cycles on the host</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>2) Create a cron job on the machine the web server is running on to execute this task</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Again, I don't like this approach because it takes cpu cycles away from the web server</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>3) Create another EC2 instance and set up a cron job to run the task</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>This solves the web server resource issues, but why pay for an additional EC2 instance to run a job for &lt;5 minutes? Waste of money!</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Are there any other options? Is this a job for ElasticMapReduce?</p>