Background Jobs and Scheduling

Move long-running or retry-prone work out of request/response paths.

  • Use queue-based workers for asynchronous processing.
  • Use schedulers for periodic jobs with explicit ownership.
  • Keep jobs idempotent and observable.

Alternatives and when to choose them

  • Cron-only approach for very small systems.
  • Workflow engines for complex multi-step job orchestration.

Implementation checklist

  • Define queue names and retry policy per job type.
  • Add dead-letter handling and alerting.
  • Add job-level tracing/log correlation IDs.

Common pitfalls

  • Hidden side effects making retries unsafe.
  • Scheduling logic spread across multiple apps without ownership.

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