Hi #prefect-community 👋 Could anyone point me to where the context object is populated? I've found that

prefect.context.scheduled_start_time

contains slightly different timezone information depending on whether I run the flow with

my_flow.run()

or whether it is run by the Docker agent. • Run with

my_flow.run()

the object as follows:

DateTime(2020, 9, 17, 13, 28, 18, 669528, tzinfo=Timezone('UTC')

. • Run by the Docker agent the object is as follows:

DateTime(2020, 9, 17, 13, 45, 0, tzinfo=Timezone('+00:00'))

. The distinction is important because they are both instances of

pendulum.DateTime

. Calling

<http://dt.to|dt.to>_iso8601_string()

results in a different string, because if the timezone is UTC, then this method replaces the trailing

+00:00

with

Z

. Whether or not this is a good idea, it would be good for

prefect.context.scheduled_start_time

to return consistent timezone information.

Hi Iain! Looks like it can be set in a couple of places: https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/9c8a44fb9b8aba86f14562dbbb9b69a45acdce5b/src/prefect/client/client.py https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/5b7015a75ea60bc5a8ffb676b3be2ff406103583/src/prefect/engine/flow_runner.py#L156 https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/3afd0feed6e73ce19e556c6b782b4efaa4624e48/src/prefect/core/flow.py#L1011

Thanks @Dylan I think at some stage, a

datetime.datetime

with a timezone of

datetime.timezone.utc

is making its way to

IntervalClock

. I'm not sure whether that's in my application code, in Prefect, or somewhere else. I'll try and investigate further.

I don’t think I would consider that a bug as such, but if you were able to make them uniform that would be an improvement!