

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So, is there any demand for this?  If so, perhaps I'll take part in the launch-in-November push going on now.<p>I threw together a document on the API with more details - comments welcome!<p>http://job-scheduler.info/
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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

