Automation, minus the jargon

Orchestrator

The engine that decides which of your automated jobs runs, when, and in what order — running the next one only when the last one actually succeeded, instead of firing everything blindly on a timer. Cronable is a self-hosted orchestrator.

Job

A single piece of work Cronable runs for you: send an email, run a script, ask an AI a question, call a web address, or query a database. You build automations by combining jobs.

Pipeline

Several jobs wired together in sequence, where each step can hand its result to the next and only runs if the previous step succeeded. A pipeline turns a pile of separate tasks into one dependable flow.

Trigger

Anything that starts a job other than the clock — a webhook, a new email in an inbox, a file dropped in a folder, or an upcoming calendar event. Triggers let your automations react to events as they happen.

Webhook

A way for another service — a payment system, a form, an app — to notify Cronable the instant something happens, so a job can respond in real time instead of waiting for the next scheduled run.

Cron

A decades-old way to schedule tasks on a computer by time — “every day at 7am”, “every Monday”. It’s where Cronable gets its name. Cron fires on the clock alone; Cronable adds the success-checking and branching that cron never had.

DAG

Short for “directed acyclic graph” — the technical name for the map of your jobs and the arrows connecting them. “Directed” means the arrows point one way; “acyclic” means they never loop back on themselves. In Cronable it’s simply the canvas you drag your jobs around on.

Self-hosted

Software that runs on a computer you control — your own laptop, server, or cloud account — rather than on the vendor’s servers. Because Cronable is self-hosted, your data, credentials and results never leave your infrastructure.

Daemon

A program that runs quietly in the background, always on. Cronable’s daemon is the part that lives on your machine, watches for schedules and triggers, and runs your jobs — no window, no babysitting.

Headless

Running a program — often an AI agent — automatically, with no chat window and nobody watching. It does the task and reports the result. Cronable runs AI agents headlessly on a schedule or a trigger.

Secret

A sensitive value a job needs, such as an API key, a password, or a database connection string. Cronable encrypts your secrets at rest, keeps them out of git, and masks them from logs.

Missing a term you’d like defined? Tell us at sales@cronable.ai and we’ll add it.