
Ask HN: `cron` or `at` for the Cloud? - neilk
For a live-chat social system, we wanted a feature where users should be able to create events, like &quot;party at 3pm on Sunday&quot;. And we&#x27;d like their friends to be notified of those events, shortly before they occur.<p>This isn&#x27;t super hard to build but I was surprised that there wasn&#x27;t a generic service for scheduling events to happen in the far future. There&#x27;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.<p>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?
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todsacerdoti
You should try Pipedream.com. Here are the docs on setting up cronjobs via API
-
[https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/tree/master/interfa...](https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/tree/master/interfaces/timer)
\- but there are multiple ways to solve your problem on the platform.

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neilk
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.

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todsacerdoti
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...](https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/blob/master/components/hacker-
news/readme.md)

