Background Tasks

Build durable background tasks, workflows, and scheduled jobs that survive crashes, retries, and long execution times.

Task Types

Standard Tasks

Fire-and-forget or awaitable background jobs. Define input/output schemas, retry policies, and timeout behavior.

Scheduled Tasks (Cron)

Recurring jobs defined with cron expressions. Ideal for data sync, cleanup, report generation, and monitoring.

Webhook Tasks

Tasks triggered by external webhook events. Validate payloads and process asynchronously.

Patterns

Retry Strategy

• Use exponential backoff for external API calls
• Distinguish between retryable errors (network, rate limit) and fatal errors (bad input, auth failure)
• Set maximum retry counts to prevent infinite loops

Parallel Execution

Run independent sub-tasks in parallel and collect results. Use batch operations instead of sequential loops.

Progress Tracking

Report task progress through metadata for long-running operations. Enable real-time monitoring from dashboards and admin panels.

Best Practices

• Keep tasks focused — one task, one responsibility
• Use structured error types for actionable failure messages
• Log metadata at every step for debugging and observability
• Set hard timeouts to prevent runaway execution