The container was failing to start on Ubuntu with Permission denied when trying to launch crond, because the container runs as the nginx user (non-root) and dcron requires root privileges. Key Decisions: - Supercronic over a sleep loop to preserve full cron expression support - Supercronic over sudo because sudo defeats non-root security model - Grouped crontab setup with supercronic startup for better code organization Supercronic was chosen because it's designed specifically for containers, runs without root, handles signals gracefully, and adds only ~2MB to image.