HN Reader

Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python

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I wrote Sidekiq, which Oban is based on. Congratulations to Shannon and Parker on shipping this!

I had to make this same decision years ago: do I focus on Ruby or do I bring Sidekiq to other languages? What I realized is that I couldn't be an expert in every language, Sidekiq.js, Sidekiq.py, etc. I decided to go a different direction and built Faktory[0] instead, which flips the architecture and provides a central server which knows how to implement the queue lifecycle internally. The language-specific clients become much simpler and can be maintained by the open source community for each language, e.g. faktory-rs[1]. The drawback is that Faktory is not focused on any one community and it's hard for me to provide idiomatic examples in a given language.

It's a different direction but by focusing on a single community, you may have better outcomes, time will tell!

[0]: https://github.com/contribsys/faktory [1]: https://github.com/jonhoo/faktory-rs

19 hours agoby mperham

> Oban allows you to insert and process jobs using only your database. You can insert the job to send a confirmation email in the same database transaction where you create the user. If one thing fails, everything is rolled back.

This is such a key feature. Lots of people will tell you that you shouldn't use a relational database as a worker queue, but they inevitably miss out on how important transactions are for this - it's really useful to be able to say "queue this work if the transaction commits, don't queue it if it fails".

Brandur Leach wrote a fantastic piece on this a few years ago: https://brandur.org/job-drain - describing how, even if you have a separate queue system, you should still feed it by logging queue tasks to a temporary database table that can be updated as part of those transactions.

18 hours agoby simonw

The Oban folks have done amazing, well-engineered work for years now - it's really the only option for Elixir. That said, I'm very confused at locking the process pool behind a pro subscription - this is basic functionality given CPython's architecture, not a nice-to-have.

For $135/month on Oban Pro, they advertise:

    All Open Source Features

    Multi-Process Execution

    Workflows

    Global and Rate Limiting

    Unique Jobs

    Bulk Operations

    Encrypted Source (30/90-day refresh)

    1 Application

    Dedicated Support

I'm going to toot my own horn here, because it's what I know, but take my 100% free Chancy for example - https://github.com/tktech/chancy. Out of the box the same workers can mix-and-match asyncio, processes, threads, and sub-interpreters. It supports workflows, rate limiting, unique jobs, bulk operations, transactional enqueuing, etc. Why not move these things to the OSS version to be competitive with existing options, and focus on dedicated support and more traditional "enterprise" features, which absolutely are worth $135/month (the Oban devs provide world-class support for issues). There are many more options available in the Python ecosystem than Elixir, so you're competing against Temporal, Trigger, Prefect, Dagster, Airflow, etc etc.

18 hours agoby TkTech

OSS Oban has a few limitations, which are automatically lifted in the Pro version:

Single-threaded asyncio execution - concurrent but not truly parallel, so CPU-bound jobs block the event loop.

This makes it not even worth trying. Celery's interface kind of sucks, but I'm used to it already, and I can get infinitely parallel expanding vertically and horizontally for as long as I can afford the resources.

I also don't particularly like ayncio, and if I'm using a job queue wouldn't expect to need it.

Edit: I looked into it a bit more, and it seems we can launch multiple worker nodes, which doesn't seem as bad as what I originally thought

15 hours agoby dec0dedab0de

Ooof. I don't mind the OSS/pro feature gate for the most part, but I really don't love that "Pro version uses smarter heartbeats to track producer liveness."

There's a difference between QoL features and reliability functions; to me, at least, that means that I can't justify trying to adopt it in my OSS projects. It's too bad, too, because this looks otherwise fantastic.

16 hours agoby offbyone

This is something my company has been considering for a while. We've been using celery and it's not great. It gets the job done but it has its issue.

I've never heard of Oban until now and the one we've considered was Temporal but that feels so much more than what we need. I like how light Oban is.

Does anyone have experience with both and is able to give a quick comparison?

Thanks!

18 hours agoby hangonhn

While this is a Cool Thing To See, I do wish things would go the other way—and have all the BI/ML/DS pipelines and workflows folks are building in Python and have them come to Elixir (and, as would follow, Elixir). I get where the momentum is, but having something functional, fault-tolerant, and concurrent underpinning work that’s naturally highly concurrent and error-prone feels like a _much_ more natural fit.

18 hours agoby Arubis

Thanks for sharing, interesting project! One thing that stood out to me is that some fairly core features are gated behind a Pro tier. For context, there are prior projects in this space that implement similar ideas fully in OSS, especially around Postgres-backed durable execution:

1. DBOS built durable workflows and queues on top of Postgres (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of DBOS), with some recent discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840693

2. Absurd explores a related design as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797228

Overall, it's encouraging to see more people converging on a database-centric approach to durable workflows instead of external orchestrators. There's still a lot of open design space around determinism, recovery semantics, and DX. I'm happy to learn from others experimenting here.

17 hours agoby qianli_cs

Is Postgres fast enough for job processing these days? We do hundreds of millions of jobs now and even years ago when our volume was a fraction of that, we got a huge performance boost moving from Postgres + Que to Redis + Sidekiq. Has that changed in the intervening years?

13 hours agoby markbao

I recommend [Celery](https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/). Celery is a simple, flexible, and reliable distributed system to process vast amounts of messages, while providing operations with the tools required to maintain such a system.

BTW its free.

10 hours agoby linter

I have fixed many broken systems that used redis for small tasks. It is much better to put the jobs in the database we already have. This makes the code easier to manage and we have fewer things to worry about. I hope more teams start doing this to save time.

18 hours agoby dfajgljsldkjag

Its not clear to me why youd need a tool to do this. Arent transactions and queue (say with celery) easy to write?

6 hours agoby cammil

We had considered Oban when deciding whether to go with Kafka/Debezium or not. We sided with Kafka because it can do high throughput ingestion and it is easier to maintain it with cursor in today's world. Postgres is not meant for heavy writes, but heavy querying. You could fix that with lot of care but then it does not scale multi-master very well either. Kafka scales much better for heavy writes.

13 hours agoby airocker