I'm moving my first steps with prefect, and I'm trying to see what its degrees of freedom are. To this end, I'm investigating whether prefect supports running different tasks on different schedules in the same python process. For example, Task A might have to run every 5 minutes, while Task B might run twice a day with a Cron scheduler.
It seems to me that schedules are associated with a Flow, not with a task, so to do the above, one would have to create two distinct one-task Flows, each with its own schedule. But even as that, given that running a flow is a blocking operation, I can't see how to "start" both flows concurrently (or pseudo-concurrently, I'm perfectly aware the flows won't execute on separate threads).
Is there a built-in way of getting the tasks running on their independent schedules? I'm under the impression that there is a way to achieve this, but given my limited experience with prefect, I'm completely missing it.
Many thanks in advance for any pointers.
You are right that schedules are associated with Flows and not Tasks, so the only place to add a schedule is a Flow. Running a Flow is a blocking operation if you are using the open source Prefect core only. For production use cases, it's recommended running your Flows against Prefect Cloud or Prefect Server. Cloud is the managed offering and Server is when you host it yourself. Note that Cloud has a very generous free tier.
When using a backend, you will use an agent that will kick off the flow run in a new process. This will not be blocking.
To start with using a backend, you can check the docs here