Making Time for Cron Triggers: A Look Inside

Today, we are excited to launch Cron Triggers to the Cloudflare Workers serverless compute platform. We’ve heard the developer feedback, and we want to give our users the ability to run a given Worker on a scheduled basis. In case you’re not familiar with Unix systems, the cron pattern allows developers to schedule jobs to run at fixed intervals. This pattern is ideal for running any types of periodic jobs like maintenance or calling third party APIs to get up-to-date data. Cron Triggers has been a highly requested feature even inside Cloudflare and we hope that you will find this feature as useful as we have!

Where are Cron Triggers going to be run?

Cron Triggers are executed from the edge. At Cloudflare, we believe strongly in edge computing and wanted our new feature to get all of the performance and reliability benefits of running on our edge. Thus, we wrote a service in core that is responsible for distributing schedules to a new edge service through Quicksilver which will then trigger the Workers themselves.

What’s happening under the hood?

At a high level, schedules created through our API create records in our database with the information necessary to execute Continue reading