Think Through Async Work & Messaging

Overview

Production guidance for asynchronous work. Each reference paper captures what breaks after deployment: poison jobs that loop forever, unacknowledged redeliveries, missed cron executions, event consumers that cannot tolerate duplicates or reordering, and email providers whose bounces and outages dominate the incident channel.

Core principle: Async work is a correctness surface. Every queue, job, and event needs defined delivery, ordering, idempotency, retry, retention, replay, and backlog semantics — with bounds and lag visibility.

Domain Law