Verne Clockwork · Cron-as-a-Service
Distributed Task Scheduling for Modern Cloud Infrastructure Serverless Background Jobs, Zero Duplicates
Stop managing crontabs on fragile instances. Clockwork provides API-driven, serverless background jobs with guaranteed execution, timezone awareness, and zero duplicate runs.
curl -X POST https://api.vernesoft.com/v1/clockwork/jobs \
-H "Authorization: Bearer vrn_cron_•••" \
-d '{"name":"billing","schedule":"0 0 1 * *","timezone":"Europe/Paris"}'The Local Crontab Trap
Why Traditional Crontabs Break in Distributed Systems
Running a local cron daemon on a VPS is easy until you scale. When you deploy multiple application instances, traditional crons lead to race conditions, overlapping executions, and silent failures.
Traditional / In-House Cron
- ✕ Race conditions: multiple instances trigger the same billing script simultaneously.
- ✕ Silent failures: no built-in alerting if a job fails to execute.
- ✕ Timezone nightmares: daylight saving time shifts break execution logic.
- ✕ Hardcoded schedules requiring full application redeployments to change.
Verne Software Clockwork
- ✓ Distributed locks guarantee exact-once execution across your entire cluster.
- ✓ Comprehensive execution logs and webhook failure alerts out-of-the-box.
- ✓ Native IANA timezone support with automatic DST handling.
- ✓ Dynamic schedule management via REST API — no redeployments needed.
Core Features
Precision Engineering for Background Jobs
Exact-Once Execution
Built on a distributed consensus model. Your job runs exactly when scheduled, without duplicate executions, even if your architecture scales to 100 instances.
Dynamic API Control
Create, pause, update, or delete schedules programmatically. Let your users define their own background tasks directly from your SaaS dashboard.
Timezone Mastery
Native support for IANA timezone databases. Schedule tasks for "09:00 AM Europe/Paris" and let Clockwork seamlessly handle daylight saving transitions.
High-Resolution Timers
Powered by Rust's low-latency concurrency model, ensuring jobs fire exactly on the designated second without drift or delay.
Observability & Logs
Complete audit trails for every trigger. See exactly when a job fired, what payload was sent, and the response it received.
Standard Cron Syntax
Full support for standard UNIX cron expressions, alongside human-readable shorthands (daily, hourly, and more).
Nautilus Ecosystem
The Perfect Match with Verne Relay
Clockwork handles the when, Relay handles the how. Use Clockwork to trigger scheduled events and route them through Relay for secure delivery with exponential backoff. Secure the entire pipeline with Auth.
Developer Experience
Schedule a Job via API
Manage your recurring tasks dynamically using any language. Just provide a cron expression and the target endpoint.
curl -X POST https://api.vernesoft.com/v1/clockwork/jobs \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_NAUTILUS_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"name": "Monthly Billing Run",
"schedule": "0 0 1 * *",
"timezone": "Europe/Paris",
"target": {
"url": "https://api.yourdomain.com/billing/process",
"method": "POST",
"payload": { "batch": "auto" }
}
}'FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Clockwork prevent duplicate executions?
Clockwork utilizes a distributed locking mechanism at the infrastructure level. Even under heavy load, the trigger is locked globally before firing, ensuring exact-once delivery to your target endpoint.
What happens if the target endpoint is down when the cron fires?
Clockwork natively integrates with Verne Relay. If your endpoint is unreachable, the event is queued and retried using a customizable exponential backoff strategy, preventing data loss.
Can I schedule one-off tasks (delayed jobs)?
Yes. Alongside recurring cron expressions, the Clockwork API supports precise timestamp scheduling for single-execution delayed tasks — for example, send an email 24 hours after registration.
Get Started Today
Take Control of Your
Background Jobs
Eliminate crontab anxiety. Build reliable, scalable, and observable scheduled tasks for your platform today.