How Honeybadger migrated from Sidekiq to Karafka
Background tasks are one of the core pillars when considering web applications for scale. The basic idea is simple: A client makes a request to your web application and in handling that request, your app performs several time-expensive tasks. To allow it to respond to the client faster, the app enqueues a background job to a background processing system. The background processing is then tasked with all the heavy lifting, like computations or I/O operations. Leaning on background jobs effectively is one of the most important building blocks when scaling your web applications.
As Rails developers, we are blessed with several fantastic libraries to choose from, all with different advantages, disadvantages, and even backend databases. These libraries make it easy to offload any heavy lifting, allowing our applications to respond faster and serve more users with fewer resources.
Until recently, we used Sidekiq to perform the majority of Honeybadger's background processing jobs. It has been instrumental in helping us maintain a blazing-fast user experience and a robust pipeline for processing the massive amounts of data we ingest.
