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Comment by sakai | Hacker News Reader

A simple service for setting up and running jobs/workers without having to run a server.

Ideally, it would have the following features:

* Pay once, run forever (pay for the job up front and never again -- no recurring billing to worry about)

* Configure once, run forever (use Docker/LXC in the background to allow custom environments and absolve the user of the dependency headaches that can arise when running multiple jobs on a single machine)

* Easy to use

I've been casually working on this as it's a pain point I've experienced numerous times (e.g., running a daily job that should cost ~50 cents per month, which is substantially below any available VM price).

Would anybody use this? Other thoughts?

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This is the only service in this space I could find: https://starthq.com/apps/crondash

It doesn't actually run the job but could be used to trigger them.

I think the idea could work if you could write the tasks as snippets of JS, think IFTT/Zapier but with a code editor.

Yes! Well said.

It would definitely need to include:

* Web code editor for jobs (JS, Python, Ruby, Perl, Go, etc., etc.)

* Results served over an authenticated API (e.g., servicename.com/api/<username>/<jobname>/files/result.csv would get you the latest result.csv file generated by your script, .../<jobname>/20140419/files/result.csv would get you yesterday's, etc.)

* Jobs could probably be both scheduled (i.e., cron-like) or triggered via a webhook

Might make sense to stick with JS to start with for the sake of simplicity.

I actually wrote a Node.js PaaS that I never open sourced & periodic short lived jobs was one of my use-cases.

Let's continue via email.

Hey guys, too late to get in on this discussion? Sounds really cool and something I could see myself using a lot.

hello at duncanmsmith.com

I work for Zapier and I'm totally planning to do this for my R / iPython jobs! Ideally I can interface through email or some other convenient service / app. Would obviously love to have the feature inside Zapier, too, we'll see!

Something like this? http://www.iron.io/worker

I use pythonanywhere.com for this. With a free account you get 1 daily task. That wasn't enough for me so I upgraded to the "Hacker" plan for $5/month and now I get 10 hourly or daily tasks. It's very simple to use and I absolutely love it. You can also pay for a year upfront.

https://www.webscript.io gets pretty close.

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