How do you define a monolith? Please establish that before we discuss further. :)

That's an incisive question. My impression, which may be mistaken, is that a cronjob would be used to move data (pages compiled from templates, chart images, etc.) into the PHP host on a "batch" basis. To me, that implied the existence of other systems that handle the data in their own way, but I guess in this thread the salient difference between micro and mono is that the former connects components via a web stack. Are there more agile interfaces available for cronjobs? If instead we're only considering transformations of data already resident on the host (as what, flat files?), I don't imagine that cronjobs are the best solution available.