faktory

Faktory is an open-source, cross-language background job processing system designed to manage asynchronous tasks and workflows. It centers on a server that coordinates job queuing and dispatches work to workers written in a variety of programming languages.

How it works: components include a Faktory server, language-specific clients for enqueuing jobs, and worker processes that pull and execute tasks. Producers submit jobs to the server, which stores them and routes them to idle workers. Workers acknowledge completion and may enqueue follow-up tasks as part of workflows.

Features: Faktory emphasizes language neutrality, offering official or community clients for languages such as Go, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. It supports job retries, scheduling, and complex workflows that chain tasks. The design enables scalable throughput and easy integration into existing microservice architectures.

Architecture and persistence: The server uses a pluggable persistence and messaging backend, allowing different deployments to choose appropriate storage and fault-tolerance strategies. The ecosystem includes tooling for monitoring, metrics, and administration to observe queue health and performance.

Comparison and usage: Faktory sits in the same category as other task queues such as Celery, Sidekiq, and Resque, but aims to be language-agnostic and scalable across services. It is used to offload long-running or periodic work from web processes and to enable asynchronous processing patterns.

See also: Celery, Sidekiq, Resque, Gearman, RQ.