Background Jobs & Queue Architecture. @background-jobs

The Background Jobs & Queue Architecture sprint moves your asynchronous work — emails, exports, imports, media processing, third-party syncs, report generation — off request threads and fragile cron scripts onto durable queue infrastructure. The finish state is your identified async workloads running on queues and workers in production, with retries, dead-letter handling, schedules, and a dashboard that shows queue depth, throughput, and failures.

Symptoms this sprint exists for: requests that time out doing work inline, cron jobs that fail silently, duplicate sends after a deploy, and nobody able to say whether last night's batch ran. The architecture is tuned to your real throughput and built in your stack — Sidekiq, Celery, BullMQ, SQS-based workers, or equivalent — not imposed on it.

Async Workload Audit

An inventory of everything running inline, in cron, or in ad-hoc scripts — classified by durability need, ordering, idempotency, and throughput, so each workload lands on the right pattern.

Queue & Worker Infrastructure

Durable queues and horizontally scalable workers in your stack and cloud, with priority lanes, concurrency controls, and graceful deploy-time draining.

Retry & Failure Semantics

Explicit retry policies with backoff per job type, idempotent job design, dead-letter queues, and alerting — so failure is a handled state, not a silent one.

Scheduling & Job Visibility

Reliable scheduled jobs with locking against double-runs, plus a dashboard for queue depth, latency, throughput, and failed-job replay.

1. Scope — Audit async workloads, choose queue infrastructure, and fix throughput targets and failure semantics per job class.
2. Build — Stand up queues and workers, migrate workloads incrementally, and load-test against target throughput.
3. Handover — Production cutover, dashboards and alerts live, and a pattern guide so new jobs follow the architecture.

The Background Jobs & Queue Architecture is a menu item on the Scrums.com delivery catalog, available at every plan tier. Add it to your plan backlog and your delivery team schedules it like any other item — scoped, tracked, and reported through the SEOP. See Delivery Plan Tiers.

Do we have to migrate every job at once?

No. The audit ranks workloads by risk and value; migration is incremental, and the old path stays available until each job class is verified on the new one.

Which queue technology will we end up on?

The lightest one that meets your durability and throughput needs in your existing cloud. The sprint optimizes for operability by your team, not for novelty.

What about very high-volume transactional workloads?

If the bottleneck is the transactional backend itself rather than async offloading, the High-Volume Transaction Backend is the right menu item — the scope step will tell you which problem you actually have.