Escaping Cron Hell: Building and Contributing to Dagu, an Open Source Workflow Orchestrator

Many teams start with a handful of cron jobs and shell scripts. Over time, these grow into business-critical workflows that become difficult to monitor, debug, retry, and maintain. While workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow and Temporal solve many of these problems, they can introduce operational complexity that smaller teams may not need.

Dagu is an open source workflow orchestration engine designed around simplicity. It allows teams to define workflows using declarative YAML, execute existing scripts and commands, visualize dependencies, monitor execution, and manage scheduled jobs without requiring a complex control plane.

In this talk, I will share my experience contributing to Dagu and explore the architectural decisions that make it lightweight while still being capable of handling production automation workloads.

The session will cover:

• The limitations of traditional cron-based automation.

• Common workflow orchestration patterns and challenges.

• How Dagu models workflows, dependencies, retries, and scheduling.

• Architectural trade-offs compared to Airflow, Temporal, and Kubernetes CronJobs.

• Lessons learned while contributing to an open source workflow orchestration project.

• Practical demonstrations of building and operating workflows using Dagu.

Attendees will gain both a practical understanding of workflow orchestration and an inside look at contributing to a growing open source infrastructure project.

Understand when cron jobs stop scaling and when workflow orchestration becomes necessary.

• Learn the core architectural concepts behind modern workflow engines.

• Discover how Dagu approaches scheduling, dependency management, and observability.

• Understand the trade-offs between Dagu, Airflow, Temporal, and Kubernetes-native approaches.

• Gain practical insights into contributing to open source infrastructure projects.

• Leave with ideas for improving automation reliability in their own environments.