DevOps on Lynx Tech Blog

I Migrated 45 Cron Jobs into Windmill: Five Lessons from a Migration

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0800

45 scheduled tasks. 25 were lying in crontab, 18 were hanging on user-level systemd timers, and 2 were pilot/split-tier tasks on the original cron. At 05:40 on August 24, 2026, I migrated them all into my self-hosted Windmill—45/45 smoke tests green, all original schedules removed. If I’d done this sooner, I would’ve saved a lot of midnight log-diving. But the closer I got to actually doing it, the more I realized the migration itself had more pitfalls than cron ever did.

Installing a Control Plane for 'Script + Cron + Agent' Black-Box Automation: A Survey of 12 Platforms

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0800

TL;DR: What I need isn’t another orchestration tool, but a Control Plane—a coordination layer that answers in one place: which workflow, which version, which run, which step failed, how many retries, when’s the next run. cron only knows how to “knock on time” and then walks away. After surveying 11 platforms, my pick: Windmill first choice, Kestra co-selected; n8n/Temporal/Argo explicitly rejected; Hermes demoted to “scheduled agent” instead of scheduler.