Do daily quota replenishment and cron task use the same timezone?

Question

I've scheduled daily job to be informed about daily quota replenishment, which happens at midnight Pacific time. Looks like it is equal to UTC-7 (or GMT-7). My local time is GMT+4. When checking the log (GMT+4 is chosen there), I see that my job runs at midnight:

2014-04-22 04:00:00.278 /admin/resetquota 200 121ms 0kb AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine) module=default version=1

But when now I check Quota Details page of GAE console (local time is 5:26pm), it says that quotas will be reset in next 18 hours, i.e. at 11am local time.

Does it mean that cron tasks use UTC time, when quota replenishment happens at UTC-7? Looks like cron.yaml allows to define timezone. How can I indicate the UTC-7 here? Is it US/Pacific?

Answer 1

Yes cron tasks use UTC time by default, but you can specify a timezone and US/Pacific is valid:

- description: daily task
  url: /cron/daily
  schedule: every day 00:00
  timezone: US/Pacific

If you try and use a timezone that is not recognised, when you update_cron an error is thrown:

Error parsing yaml file:
Unable to assign value 'US/does-not-exist' to attribute 'timezone':
timezone 'US/does-not-exist' is unknown
  in "./cron.yaml", line 13, column 13