itsual Background Jobs and Async Processing
Overview
Moving work out of the critical request path improves responsiveness and scalability, but introduces new failure modes that must be handled deliberately.
When to Use
- Long-running or resource-intensive tasks
- Work that can be eventually consistent
- Decoupling producers from consumers
- Scheduled or recurring work
Key Design Points
- Idempotency of job handlers
- Retry strategy with backoff
- Dead-letter / failed job handling
- Visibility timeouts and at-least-once delivery realities
- Observability (queue depth, processing latency, failure rates)
- Ordering requirements (if any)
Principles
- Prefer simple, well-understood queue systems unless complexity is justified
- Make jobs restartable and side-effect safe
- Surface failures clearly
Verification
- Failed jobs are visible and recoverable
- Duplicate execution does not cause incorrect results
- Key metrics are monitored