JMSJobQueueBundle | Schedule Symfony Console Commands as Background | Cron Utils library

Just as a warning, the problem you are trying to solve is not a trivial one.

A few options:

1. If you connect to a MySQL database, acquire a lock (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_get-lock) at the beginning of the transaction and release the lock at the end. this will prevent multiple cronjobs to run the code at the same time. works only if everything is handled inside SQL.

2. As you mentioned, you can use AWS Lambda + CloudWatch Events to trigger a Lambda function every x minutes and the Lambda can than trigger your script via http(s). But lambda does not guarantee that is does so exactly once, so this is not safe.

3. Use a service where you can acquire a distributed lock (e.g. etcd, consul, redis, ...) and implement in a similar way than 1 just not in your MySQL database. Still you can nor really enfore exactly once with this.

4. put the cronjob on a separate ec2 instance where you know that it exsists only once (in case of this ec2 instance goes down nothing will run, but as far as I understand your requirements this is not a problem because the script can run 15 minutes later and still catches up with all the work.

The more "modern" approach in distributed systems would be to make your action idempotent.