A few words about Upstart, an alternative
Upstart is an event-based replacement for the traditional SysV init system used to manage and control services and daemons on a system. Upstart was introduced in Ubuntu 6.10 and later versions and is designed to improve boot time, simplify system configuration, and provide more flexibility in managing system services. It has now been largely replaced by systemd in most Linux distributions.
Upstart is used to manage the initialization process of the system and to start, stop, and supervise tasks and services. It is designed to be more flexible and efficient than the traditional init daemon and to provide more information about the status of tasks and services.
All that can be managed by systemd and/or cron has become an industry standard, so if you don’t have a good reason for using those or already have a system using Upstart, we discourage you from using it as a default.