Azure/Heroku Service Bus

Background Jobs in Heroku with Azure Service Bus

Web applications are optimized for throughput and latency to service a high number of HTTP requests as quickly as possible. For improved performance, web applications defer the CPU intensive, IO intensive, time-intensive, and scheduled processing workloads to background jobs that run independently of the user interface. These background jobs must function without intervention from the user interface and should not block a synchronous user and system interaction. Offloading slow and compute or memory-intensive activity to background jobs improves web applications’ performance and throughput.

For example, consider an eCommerce web application that captures a customer’s orders and triggers the background jobs to process the orders further. The application’s background jobs work with the operational data (all orders placed by customers) and the contextual data (orders for a single customer) to update the inventory and shipping systems.

Heroku supports several queue services as add-ons such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, and IronMQ. However, you are not limited to using add-ons for integrating with cloud queue services. In this example, we will build a background job that processes messages from an Azure Service Bus queue. AWS, Azure, and GCP offer message queues as a service that you can use to extend the capabilities of your Heroku applications.

Azure Service Bus offers a rich set of features including support for…