AWS EventBridge Scheduled Tasks Guide

Overview

Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) enables scheduled execution of Lambda functions. Use it for cron jobs, periodic data processing, cleanup tasks, and scheduled reports.

Schedule Expressions

EventBridge supports two formats:

Rate Expression

rate(1 hour)
rate(5 minutes)
rate(1 day)

Cron Expression

EventBridge cron uses 6 fields (includes year):

cron(minutes hours day-of-month month day-of-week year)

Examples:

• Daily at midnight UTC: cron(0 0 * * ? *)
• Every weekday at 9 AM UTC: cron(0 9 ? * MON-FRI *)
• First of every month: cron(0 0 1 * ? *)
• Every 15 minutes: rate(15 minutes)

All times are in UTC.

Serverless Framework Integration

Scheduled events can be defined directly in serverless.yml:

functions:
  cleanupExpiredSessions:
    handler: handler.cleanup
    events:
      - schedule:
          rate: rate(1 day)
          enabled: true
          input:
            task: cleanup_sessions

This is the recommended approach - the schedule is deployed and managed alongside the Lambda function.

Alternatives

Service	When to Use
EventBridge	AWS-native, deep Lambda integration
CloudWatch Events	Legacy name, same service as EventBridge
GCP Cloud Scheduler	Google Cloud equivalent
cron (on EC2/ECS)	Traditional server-based scheduling