Have you read the article? The fourth paragraph lists improvements systemd timers bring over cron:

Cron is easy, very simple and robust mechanism to execute periodic tasks on a *nix server, and is available by default on all popular Linux distributions. However, cron suffers from some issues:

• If the system is down when the cron needs to run, the cron will be missed

• There is no built-in status monitoring

• There are no built-in logs

• If you want to execute pre/post commands (for example by pinging an external service for success/failure) you have to do it inside the script itself

All of these issues are addressed with systemd services and timers, as the authors explains in details.

The author fails to mention you can also use timers to do schedules like “every 15 minutes, 5 minutes after the systemd started”. Very useful for scheduling automatic updates or backups.

The first one also has better code coverage and way more pulls on Docker Hub.