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Serverless functions and background jobs

Short-lived work — a function invocation, a cron run, a background job — is where per-run isolation is cheapest to adopt. These posts cover serverless design, cron and scheduling, queues and retries, and running each invocation on its own machine.

Serverless functions on PandaStack

41 posts

·11 min read

The Best Batch Compute Platforms for Bursty Jobs in 2026

Nine ways to run a few thousand independent jobs, grouped by what they actually are rather than ranked. Most of your decision is made by two facts: whether you need GPUs, and whether you are willing to pay for a cluster that is idle most of the week.

comparisonbatchjob-queue
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

Saying No Correctly: Admission Control for Sandbox Fleets

Almost no capacity bug is 'we ran out of RAM.' It is either a yes you could not fit, or a no you did not have to give — and the second one is more expensive, because it looks like your platform is broken.

schedulingcapacitymicrovm
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

Running Firecracker Under Nomad

Nomad will happily place a Firecracker microVM on a host, restart it, and register it in Consul. It will not clone your rootfs, build your network, restore your snapshot, or notice that the guest inside your perfectly healthy VMM process has been wedged for ten minutes.

nomadfirecrackerorchestration
Ajay Kumar
·13 min read

The best Inngest alternatives in 2026

Most teams shopping for an Inngest alternative do not want a different step DSL. They want the same work expressed as an ordinary long-running process they own.

comparisonbackground-jobsworkflows
Ajay Kumar
·13 min read

Webhook Replay and Relay: Ingest First, Process Later

The provider retried for eleven hours, gave up, and the event is gone with no record you can inspect. The fix is boring and it is one afternoon of work: ingest first, process later.

webhooksarchitecturereliability
Ajay Kumar
·8 min read

How to Run a BullMQ Worker Alongside Your Node App

A few thousand jobs a day does not need a second always-on service. It needs a second process. Here is how to run BullMQ next to your Node app — including the Redis part nobody says out loud.

nodetypescriptbullmq
Ajay Kumar
·8 min read

Top 7 Celery Hosting Platforms in 2026

A Celery worker is a process that starts and then sits there for weeks. That one sentence disqualifies half the places people try to deploy it. Here's where it does work, and what each option makes you pay for.

comparisoncelerypython
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

The 8 Best AWS SQS Alternatives in 2026

Nobody sets out to replace SQS. You just want a job to run in forty minutes, or a priority lane, or yesterday's events back. Here are eight honest options and what each one is actually good at.

comparisonqueuessqs
Ajay Kumar
·8 min read

How to Run a Sidekiq Worker Alongside Your Rails App

Four thousand jobs a day does not need a second always-on service. It needs a second process. Here is how to run Sidekiq next to Puma — including the Redis part nobody wants to say out loud.

railsrubysidekiq
Ajay Kumar

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