Ruby on Rails Background Jobs with Sidekiq

by David Bryant Copeland

One of the best ways to improve your Rails app’s performance is to use background jobs with Sidekiq. While Sidekiq is easy to get set up, you need to do more than just move code around to reap the benefits. In this book, you’ll get solutions to what sort of code should go into a Sidekiq job and how to manage those jobs.

You’ll create a Sidekiq configuration that will serve as a solid foundation for your app, including how to be notified when jobs inevitably fail. You’ll then tame alerting fatigue by designing idempotent jobs that can be safely retried in the face of the types of transient failures that are common in networked applications, all without alerting you until action is needed. With that foundation, you’ll get a conceptual framework for general monitoring and alerting around your Sidekiq installation and the Redis database it uses, as well as practical tips for organizing the code around your Sidekiq jobs. You’ll also learn valuable testing strategies for code that uses Sidekiq jobs.

In no time at all you’ll build a Rails app using Sidekiq that is efficient, manageable, and sustainable.

Using Sidekiq for background jobs is a great way to scale and grow your app. This book will give you a solid, practical foundation for creating resilient, well-tested, self-healing code that uses background jobs. You’ll be able to simulate real-world failure modes and learn how to write idempotent code that can be safely run with Sidekiq.

Buy this DRM-free Pragmatic Bookshelf ebook today!

Using Sidekiq for background jobs is a great way to scale and grow your app. This book will give you a solid, practical foundation for creating resilient, well-tested, self-healing code that uses background jobs. You’ll be able to simulate real-world failure modes and learn how to write idempotent code that can be safely run with Sidekiq.

126 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2023

About the author

David Copeland is a programmer and author. He wrote "The Senior Software Engineer" and "Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby", and has over 16 years of professional development experience. He's managed high-performance, high-traffic systems at LivingSocial, helped build the engineering team at Opower, and worked consulting gigs both large and small. Currently, he's a lead engineer at fashion start-up Stitch Fix, building a platform that will change the retail shopping experience.

Reviews

[Pawan Dubey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very quick read: almost a primer on a Sidekiq with rails. It did teach me a couple of new features and also refreshed my memory on others.

Otherwise mostly applicable for people new to writing and managing background jobs, and does a fine job towards that audience.

[facundo espinosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for devs starting with Sidekiq, but it contains some nice tips for people that have been using it for some time. It’s a short book, so it’s worth to read it.