I have an existing kubernetes deployment, it is used for data processing. We run it as non-root user(which is mandated in our group because of security reasons).

Now, we have a new requirement for which we want to run cron job in the background, I understand that we shouldn't be using multiple processes in a single pod but this is something we need to ship fast and we don't have enough time and resources to re-architect things. I installed cron in my docker image and my trouble is around starting this cron process, I can't start it after starting pod because my user doesn't have root permission to start a service. I tried a few ways to add it to start at boot process list like update-rc.d cron defaults but nothing worked so far. Please guide me if there is a way to make it work.

We are using ubuntu-minimal 20 base image.