---
title: "Cron Job — Definition | FourSight Glossary"
url: https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cron-job
description: "A scheduled task that runs at fixed times or intervals, defined by a `crontab` expression. Originally a Unix utility; the name is now used for any sched…"
lang: en
---

Back to glossary: https://foursight.cloud/glossary

Operations

# Cron Job

A scheduled task that runs at fixed times or intervals, defined by a `crontab` expression. Originally a Unix utility; the name is now used for any scheduled background job.

Source

- The Open Group — POSIX crontab specification (https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/crontab.html)

Related guide: Heartbeat Monitoring for Cron Jobs: https://foursight.cloud/guides/heartbeat-monitoring-cron-jobs

## Related terms

Blue-Green Deployment

A zero-downtime release strategy with two identical environments.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blue-green-deploy

Rolling Deployment

A release strategy that replaces instances of an old version with the new version gradually, a few at a tim…
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/rolling-deploy

Failover

Switching automatically (or manually) from a failed primary system to a healthy standby.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/failover

Circuit Breaker

A pattern where a client temporarily stops calling a failing downstream service after a threshold of errors…
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/circuit-breaker

Queue Saturation

A failure mode where work arrives at a queue faster than it's processed, the queue grows unbounded, and lat…
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/queue-saturation

ETL Pipeline

"Extract, Transform, Load" — a scheduled data pipeline that pulls data from a source, transforms it, and wr…
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/etl-pipeline

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