Ask HN: `cron` or `at` for the Cloud?

2 points by neilk 6y ago ↗ HN

For a live-chat social system, we wanted a feature where users should be able to create events, like "party at 3pm on Sunday". And we'd like their friends to be notified of those events, shortly before they occur.

This isn't super hard to build but I was surprised that there wasn't a generic service for scheduling events to happen in the far future. There's no standard way to (for instance) trigger an AWS Lambda function to run at a particular time in the future, with a particular set of arguments, that might send a notification, or an email, or call another API.

Is there anything like this? Would you find it useful if it was a SaaS or something you could add to your hosted cloud services?

3 comments

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todsacerdoti 6y ago ↗

You should try Pipedream.com. Here are the docs on setting up cronjobs via API - https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/tree/master/interfa... - but there are multiple ways to solve your problem on the platform.

neilk 6y ago ↗

You or someone else from Pipedream commented on my Twitter thread, the last time I asked about this. Is this a coincidence? How are you monitoring everything?

I did see the Pipedream recipe but I believe the concept was to run a function in the cloud which looped forever until a time had been reached. Doesn't seem that scalable.

todsacerdoti 6y ago ↗

I monitor HN using a Pipedream workflow of course. Here is the code and you can set it up in about two minutes - https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/blob/master/compone...