Background Jobs

Purpose

Move work out of the request path without losing it. A job system is a distributed system with a friendly interface; the failure modes are the same, and they are hidden until they are not.

When to Use

• Work that is slow, retriable, or must survive a request timeout: emails, exports, webhooks, media processing.
• Scheduled and recurring work.
• Diagnosing duplicate side effects, stuck queues, or jobs that silently disappear.

Capabilities

• Queue and worker design, including priority and isolation.
• Idempotency and exactly-once effects.
• Retry policy: backoff, jitter, attempt limits, dead-letter handling.
• Scheduling: cron jobs, delayed jobs, and deduplicating them across instances.
• Observability: queue depth, age, failure rate.