Are your production servers configured in something other than UTC, or is there a factor here I'm missing? I've never really seen a good reason for a live server not to be Z'd out
This is grand-parent's point IMO: running your cron on UTC is a decision to have it on that specific timezone.
So you're effectively deciding for instance to send your user newsletter at varying hours, sometimes at 1h00, sometimes at 3h00. Or accept that every scheduled event needs to be appropriately timezoned and adjusted as needed if DST change.
Or to have your logs timestamp be non obvious when comparing events separated by months, or have to convert all your business timestamps to a different timezone.
Those are all sensitive decisions, and we usually accept the trade-off, but it needs to be an explicit tradeoff.
