Cron Job Alternatives

The cluster discusses alternatives to traditional cron jobs for scheduling and running background tasks, frequently mentioning tools like Celery, task queues, and distributed schedulers, while debating their advantages over cron in terms of reliability and scalability.

📉 Falling 0.5x DevOps & Infrastructure
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Keywords

JIT cronhub.io OSS vercel.app DBOS OpenTelemetry CEO BusyBee uptimerobot.com example.com cron jobs job background queue tasks idle coroutines scheduler let users

Sample Comments

Grue3 Apr 16, 2014 View on HN

No, do it with Celery! It does everything cron can, but better.

batuhandirek Sep 29, 2022 View on HN

Love the irony that while the product is trying to "Make cron jobs a thing of the past", it probably runs with one polling the scheduled messages every second to send them JIT

davidecerri Feb 26, 2013 View on HN

finally an alternative to cron.

jedberg Nov 6, 2025 View on HN

As the CEO of DBOS I'm of course heavily biased, but I think DBOS is the perfect solution for you. It has everything you need (queues, crons, easy to understand pure Python). We'd be happy to help you through it if you get stuck. You can pop into the DBOS discord too (link on our webpage).

wsterling Oct 8, 2015 View on HN

I was really hoping for a Chronos like job scheduler for tasks.

timClicks Feb 16, 2022 View on HN

What's the state of the art in terms of "distributed cron" these days?

nesarkvechnep Jan 24, 2023 View on HN

Can this be more overengineered? Wouldn’t cron jobs do the job just fine?

woeirua Jan 17, 2020 View on HN

Yes, use a dedicated job server/process like Celery.

waxjar Jul 2, 2015 View on HN

A distributed cron job cluster. Interesting!

cjbprime Aug 22, 2016 View on HN

I haven't had this problem, but I would consider switching to a task queue like Celery. It'll be more robust/reliable than cron, too.