Scheduled Task
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A scheduled task is just a cron job with a friendlier name. It's any piece of code that runs automatically at a set time or interval. 'Run this every Monday morning' or 'run this every 15 minutes.' Set it and forget it.
Real Talk
A scheduled task is an automated job configured to execute at predetermined times or intervals. Often managed by cron, cloud schedulers (AWS EventBridge, GCP Cloud Scheduler), or framework-specific schedulers. Functionally equivalent to cron jobs in most modern contexts.
When You'll Hear This
"Create a scheduled task to sync data from the third-party API daily." / "Cloud Run supports scheduled tasks via Cloud Scheduler."
Related Terms
Background Job
A background job is work your app does behind the scenes that the user doesn't wait for.
Cron Job
A cron job is a task that runs on a schedule automatically. 'Every day at midnight, clean up old sessions.' 'Every hour, send digest emails.
Worker
A worker is a background process that picks up jobs from a queue and does the heavy lifting.