Node.js fundamentals

Messaging, Queues, and Background Workers

Design asynchronous workflows with queues, retries, and dead-letter handling you can operate.

Cover art for Messaging, Queues, and Background Workers

MYR 1,480 · 6 weeks · async-first

Async with weekly office hours async

Outline

We connect producers and consumers with realistic failure modes. You will implement retries with jitter, inspect poison messages, and write operator notes teammates can follow at 2 a.m.

Inclusions

  • Queue selection trade-offs (Redis, SQS-style patterns)
  • Retry budgets and jitter maths
  • Dead-letter triage workflow
  • Worker scaling discussion
  • Backpressure between HTTP and workers
  • Metrics to watch (depth, age, failures)
  • Runbook for stuck messages

Outcomes

  1. Ship a worker pair with DLQ handling
  2. Define SLOs for queue depth with alerts sketched
  3. Run a simulated failure drill

Participant notes

“Dead-letter triage in Messaging, Queues, and Background Workers saved our Friday deploy — the runbook section is gold.”
— Ken · Backend learner · Retail internal tools
“Retry jitter maths was tougher than expected; worth it for the specifics.”
— Alia

Straight answers

Kafka-heavy?
We reference Kafka concepts but labs focus on simpler brokers for faster feedback.
Infrastructure?
You use shared sandbox brokers; bespoke enterprise clusters are not provisioned.
Limitation?
We do not tune massive throughput clusters; focus is reliable patterns for small teams.