It might surprise you that the version of cron that runs on your server today is largely compatible with the crontab spec written in the 1970s. One downside of this careful backwards compatibility is that jobs, even on the same server, can be created and scheduled differently.

Cron job failures create chaos for your users and your team. After analyzing over a million failure reports these 4 problems emerged as the most likely causes of preventable job failures.

In the first 30 days after moving Cronitor to AWS in January, 2015 we collected $535 in MRR and paid $64.47 for hosting, data transfer and a domain name. In the time since we’ve continued to increase our footprint, level-up instances and add more managed services. Despite the AWS reputation as an expensive foot-gun we’ve improved availability while keeping our bill consistently close to 12.5% of revenue. Here’s a look.

Ten years ago, still young in my career building software things, I got my first taste of DevOps. We didn’t call it that back then but for the first time I had to worry about how my software would be delivered to the world.

In June, 2014 we shipped an MVP for Cronitor that was so basic I cringe a little when I think about it. It didn’t do very much, most features were cut, but it shipped with paid subscriptions on day one. We sold one to a friend. My earliest work on subscription integration was primitive: The first month’s charge was captured during the upgrade but we created each subscription by hand in the Stripe dashboard.