Scheduling & Workflows

Layers runs time-based work on two tiers:

1. Per-layer schedules — every project layer has a cadence for its scheduled commands (defaulting to the layer template, overridable per project). Due commands fire on their own cadence.
2. Global schedules — a set of platform-wide schedules that handle cross-project work (platform sync, ads metrics, optimization, scoring, reconciliation).

You don't normally interact with the scheduler directly — Layers takes care of it. But understanding the cadence is useful for debugging timing.

Per-layer cron overrides

Each layer template defines a default cron for its *-scheduled commands. You can override per-project by setting project_layers.schedule.cron:

{
  "schedule": { "cron": "37 9 * * *" }
}

This is useful for:

• Timezone-specific batch windows ("run at 9:37 UTC for the EU morning").
• Smoothing load (if many projects share a default cron, override the busy ones to spread).
• Per-client SLAs (premium clients get faster cadence).

The scheduler prefers the per-layer override over the template default, so there's exactly one cron per layer at any moment. No double execution.

Global cadence

Representative global cadences you can count on:

Schedules are non-overlapping — if the previous run hasn't finished, the next trigger is skipped rather than queued.

Workflows

Every layer command runs as a durable workflow. Workflows:

• Are durable — they survive restarts.
• Are versioned — each workflow has a slug + version.
• Are idempotent at the step level — individual steps can be retried freely.

You can introspect workflow runs in the Workflow runs panel of any layer settings page.

Failure handling

When a workflow fails:

1. The failure is recorded with a full trace.
2. The failure is published to the notifications system.
3. The workflow can be retried from the UI.
4. Content-generation workflows that fail mid-flight mark their target content_container as failed (so they don't appear stuck in processing).

See Failure modes for SLAs on each integration.