HN Explorer

Ask HN: Any interest in this API as a service?

3 points by shpxnvz ↗ HN
I put this together to use for a couple of personal projects and thought I'd see if there's any interest in something like this as a pay service.

It's essentially a hosted REST-like API for job scheduling - give it a cron expression or a single time in the future and it notifies the application by HTTP/S callback at the appropriate moment(s). You can provide an arbitrary payload to be delivered along with the callback containing identifying state.

I'm using it mostly for scheduling test executions and user lifecycle management, but I imagine it could be useful for quite a bit more.

So, is there any demand for this? If so, perhaps I'll take part in the launch-in-November push going on now.

I threw together a document on the API with more details - comments welcome!

http://job-scheduler.info/

4 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 23.6 ms ] thread
johns
Something like this has been posted here a long time ago, but I'm having trouble recalling the name or link. I think there is a demand for this and there will be more and more as more apps move to the cloud.
shpxnvz
That's what I thought, and I figured this would be a good way for startups to save time that would otherwise be spent finding, deploying and maintaining job scheduling infrastructure.

But, given the lack of interest I wonder if it's just not something most startups think they need?

johns
It's more that they don't need it yet. I think you should run with it for a little while and see where it goes. If you can add more value than just cron via REST, you might have something. I don't know what that value is.
shpxnvz
I don't know what that value is.

Me either, which is of course part of what I was hoping to get some insight about from the discussion here.

I've some ideas about what I would have been happy to have found when I was starting projects, e.g. a simple hosted API for user lifecycle management, but little evidence so far to support viability as paid services.

Well, I suppose I'll just have to launch them and find out, then.