Today the Cloudflare Workers team is thrilled to announce the launch of Cron Triggers. Before now, Workers were triggered purely by incoming HTTP requests but starting today you’ll be able to set a scheduler to run your Worker on a timed interval. This was a highly requested feature that we know a lot of developers will find useful, and we’ve heard your feedback after Serverless Week.

We are excited to offer this feature at no additional cost, and it will be available on both the Workers free tier and the paid tier, now called Workers Bundled. Since it doesn’t matter which city a Cron Trigger routes the Worker through, we are able to maximize Cloudflare’s distributed system and send scheduled jobs to underutilized machinery. Running jobs on these quiet machines is both efficient and cost effective, and we are able to pass those cost savings down to you.

What is a Cron Trigger and how might I use such a feature?

In case you’re not familiar with Unix systems, the cron pattern allows you to schedule jobs to run periodically at fixed intervals or at scheduled times. Cron Triggers in the context of Workers allow users to set time-based invocations for the job. These Workers happen on a recurring schedule, and differ from traditional Workers in that they do not fire on HTTP requests.

Most developers are familiar with the cron pattern and its usefulness across a wide range of applications. Pulling the latest data from APIs or running regular integration tests on a preset schedule are common examples of this.

“We’re excited about Cron Triggers. Workers is crucial to our stack, so using this feature for live integration tests will boost the developer experience.” - Brian Marks, Software Engineer at Bazaarvoice

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