Cloud based cron job, Should i built it ?
Hello folks!
I am a developer based out in India. I have this idea stuck to me for quite some time. The idea is to build a SaaS that could be used to call some webhook or HTTP end-point at scheduled date-time or on a recurring basis.
Users could simply submit their URLs with scheduling details and the service would make sure to call the webhook or HTTP end-point at the right time.
I am aware of many use-cases for this service but i want to know if there are developers who are looking for this type of service.
Any suggestion or response would be great help.
Cheers !!
Tried building it myself. Got some good feedback from initial users and decided not to pursue it because the problem I was solving was not big enough to get people to part with their money. I think it would be a good free tool, and you'd have to find other ways to monetize it, or make it part of a bigger product (like Heroku or something).
Let me know if you want a headstart on the coding, I think I still have my old MVP laying around and you can use it as a starting base.
cronhub.io does something similar, it passed through my radar a few days ago, looks like there is a way to make money in the space, he's has been posting reports on IH.
Thanks for the feedback :)
What i am trying to build is exact opposite of cronhub. Cronhub requires you to have a cron job that would be monitored by them for possible down time or status.
I am trying to eliminate the task of developing and managing the cron yourself and let the service handle that for you.
Oh right I see now. The first issue that springs to mind is firewalls. Not all cloud servers are internet facing, so it might get a bit complicated setting up firewalls to allow inbound connections. On the other hand your idea isn't a cron job replacement, so for some applications it might be very useful.
You are right, it could only be used if your end-point is public facing.
There are a few alternatives, I even built one myself with @lehtu some time ago 😁
My suggestion would be that find your niche first: Is there a specific problem that you could solve with a cloud-based cron? Why someone would use your service instead of the default cron that comes with AWS?
We figured out our niche problem and we'll probably continue and re-launch our cron service after some time. At least I believe there's still room in the market :)
Thanks for your feedback. :)
I am planning to make the service different by incorporating response validation and alert user if webhook response return error or specific status.
History of webhook calls and response is an addition.
Monitoring (for erroneous responses) is done pretty well by Pingdom. What's your differentiator to them? What kind of problem do you solve with your features?
E.g. Pingdom sends requests to your site/endpoint in pre-specified intervals and monitors the outcome. It sends you alerts if error happens. This is their feature set, which is similar to what you're doing. The problem they solve is that otherwise you need to wait until your customers (or worst case customer's customers) notice and alert you that your service is down, which hurts your business.
What is the problem that your service solves?
Curious if you ever built this and how it turned out?
Not really, i did some market research and finally concluded that with advent of cloud functions/AWS lambda paired with cloud schedular developers can easily build their own solutions.
So i dropped the idea of building one, let me know if you are looking forward to make one :)
wondering if it could be a good idea to have "conditional crons", where depending on the response of a cron job, you execute another job, etc. and so you could automate things in a "smart way".
Check out https://webtask.io/
https://webtask.io/docs/cron
did a basic one on my site https://www.openode.io/ as a sub service. As automation is so important there are certainly new areas to explore i would guess - pretty much most serious websites need it.
Thanks for replying :)
Your service looks promising.
All the best for the venture.
Hi @tilaksasmal, I had basically the same idea and also thought about it a lot until finally building it as https://posthook.io. I posted a Show HN and got great feedback and encouragement from it so it validated to me that at least there's excitement for something like this in the developer community.
Hey thanks for the feedback and it made me little hopeful :)
Interesting idea @tilaksasmal. I had a similar idea of a service which would consume incoming webhooks and treat them like UNIX steams. Webhook in -> manipulate data -> Webhook out. Could also buffer incoming webhooks, for example wait for 3 webhooks to come in before forwarding all 3 to some up-stream service.
Thanks for your feedback :)
What you have mentioned is interesting and possibly could be a separate service.
But what i am trying to build is different. I am building a platform to schedule a webhook call and provide API to dynamically create on-demand scheduled calls to webhook End-points.
Hey @tilaksasmal, are you thinking to create on-demand cron job hosting platform? If that's the case I think it's a really great problem to work on. I have had this idea myself and eventually may turn Cronhub into a hub where people can host and monitor their cron jobs. Everything in one place but I'm still far away from that goal.
With all the innovation in developer tools space, I still believe that setting and managing cron jobs can be a lot easier than it is now.
If you want to brainstorm more or anything feel free to shoot me an email at tigran@cronhub.io.
Good luck! :)
Thanks for your valuable feedback, looking forward to connect with you. :)
I think it’s useful if an application is cluster based, has 2 or more severs, implementing a Cron job in distributed environment could mean you have use sidekiq or something similar framework which is backed by Redis to do the scheduling if you want the jobs to be balanced between all your server.
By using an external service, you don’t need to implement that infrastructure. You could use let the external service start a job by hitting a load balanced end-point.
Not to discourage you, but I can easily write a simple lambda function to do this exact thing. Your service has offer more than just the execution of an endpoint. Maybe analytics and also monitoring of cron which there are already other services out there. I don’t know of a service that covers both the use cases.
You are right writing a lambda function is easy and as you have mentioned, i am planning to include analytics and Restful API to schedule the webhook caller.
Eg. Use case would be, suppose you want to notify a user of certain things after 2 days, you can simply make a API request to the service to schedule a webhook call after 2 days and at the webhook you can write the logic to push the notification.
So you can schedule as many webhook calls as you like from your own application using the API.
I'm using https://cron-job.org/en/ for this purpose and it's free, What's the USP?
Hey Thanks for the feedback :)
The features provided by cron-job.org is what we have and in addition to that we have full fledged RESTful API to schedule the webhook caller and you can easily schedule new call from you own application programmatically.
cronhub already exists for this last time I checked?!
Hey thanks for the reply :)
Cronhub monitors the cron job that is already running on your servers or cloud.
What i am trying to build would eliminate the task of developing and managing the background cron job by yourself.
You simply use the service to schedule tasks using webhook or call any http-end point.
Interesting idea. If i got it right, I will provide an endpoint , a frequency and a payload and your product would keep hitting it.
My question is - people who use the word “CRON” can typically do it themselves. Probably you can find a niche in automation space? Maybe I haven’t understood this, but who is your target audience?
Thanks for the feedback :)
I am targeting the developer community. I want to eliminate the tedious task of running your own cron job on server or cloud.
Why to use the service if you could buit it..?
The benefits of using a service like this would be easy management of scheduled jobs and you get notified if any thing goes wrong or if your webhook return invalid response.
Building a robust background job is a hard task. you need to cover all corners and have to make sure that it is always up and running.
That would be cool, although there are already multiple solutions for this, but it sounds quick and easy enough to build and try to validate
Thanks for the reply :)
Could you please mention some of the service that you personally like.
Well i guess services like IFTT ciukd do this, you could also do it yourself with a Cronjob or a Job in kubernetes.
I usually deploy a Job or a Cronjob to trigger something recurringly
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
Hey thanks for your feedback :)
Creating a simple cron is easy but building a cron that could provide analytics and notification of any possible error is quite some work.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago