Time Without Ticks

Serverless agents have no background processes. They wake when called, execute, and return to sleep. There's no setInterval(), no cron daemon, no persistent timers.

But agents need time-awareness. Scheduled tasks. Periodic checks. Delayed retries. Coordinated operations.

The Time Problem

Without shared time infrastructure, each agent reimplements scheduling. Each implementation has edge cases. Each implementation is a potential point of failure.

Worse: coordination across time becomes coordination across different clocks. Agent A's "every hour" might not align with Agent B's "every hour" if they're using different timing mechanisms.

The Serverless Constraint

Traditional cron requires a persistent process. Serverless functions are ephemeral. They can't run background timers. They can't maintain state between invocations.

This creates a fundamental mismatch: agents need time-awareness, but serverless architecture doesn't provide it.

The Solution: Externalized Time

CronSynth provides time-awareness as a service. Register a cron expression, receive webhook triggers. No background processes required. No persistent state to manage.

Agents get scheduled triggers without infrastructure overhead. Time becomes a service, not a constraint.

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Part of the EchoRift infrastructure series.