Node.js Background Jobs for Modern Developers – Interview With Startups of the Year Nominee, Defer

Hey Hackers,

Defer has been nominated in HackerNoon's annual Startup of the Year awards in Paris, France.

Please vote for us here: https://hackernoon.com/startups/europe/europe-paris-france.

Read more about Defer below to understand why we deserve your vote.

Meet Defer

Defer enables Node.js developers to create background jobs, CRONs, and workflows without leaving their application code and without infrastructure knowledge.

Move some existing parts of your code to the background and immediately benefit from the Defer platform auto-scaled infrastructure and the Defer Console to manage your executions and get notified upon failures.

While many Node.js infrastructure tools arose in the past years (think Vercel, Supabase, Fly), the developer experience around background jobs remained unchanged for years while being one of the most challenging parts of the web tech stack.

We believe that Node.js developers should also benefit from multiple Environments support, slick collaborative dashboard, and real-time notifications when working with async tasks without having to deal with workers and queues:

We love DX and infrastructure

We are two technical founders (Bryan, CTO, and myself, Charly, CEO) with over 15 years of working in startups from early stages to unicorns.

Bryan is an infrastructure and Go aficionado and Erlang contributor.

I am obsessed with developer experience and built a background processing platform at Algolia.

With our first Founding Engineer, Émile, we are committed to making background jobs a great experience!

How We're Disrupting the Infrastructure Industry

Background jobs are increasingly essential and desperately need innovation.

Most applications rely on third-party APIs; for example, by offering product integrations, applications must introduce a layer of async tasks to protect themselves from external failures and rate limiting.OpenAI/LLM is also a brand new example of similar challenges.

Also, working with multiple environments (think staging followed by production) is now a common practice and a commodity; writing and deploying background jobs should be a productive task too.

Developers in big companies tend to build their solutions on top of AWS SQS, Redis, or SQL databases.

Through our experiences, we had to build a custom background processing solution. We realized that most developers of 100+ employees companies build their own application queueing solution that offers throttling, concurrency, grouping, dead letter queue, or custom retries strategies. However, those solutions don’t match most of the production challenges of application queueing: how to handle rolling restarts, auto-scale your workers, safely deploy without interrupting long-running jobs, encrypt jobs’ data, or how to version jobs.

We are building Defer to support productive and robust async tasks, at any scale.

Defer is inspired by some awesome tools like Next.js, Remix, and Netlify design, and our background jobs are basically background functions that live in your code, which is super convenient. You can configure options like retries, concurrency, and more without thinking about queues and workers again!

Plus, your background functions get continuously deployed from GitHub, and you can test new background jobs super quickly with branch-based environments before releasing them to production.

What sets Defer apart is that we offer features like configurable retries (with advanced backoff options) and throttling, which other solutions make you implement yourself or don't even have. And our Defer Dashboard is the only one that lets you find executions based on business/product metadata, which is pretty cool when you need to debug product issues.

We use a progressive deployment approach that lets us release updates multiple times daily without interrupting long-running jobs (some of our customers' jobs run for over 5 hours!). And once your app is up and running, our dashboard gives you all the essential information to operate background jobs: activity histograms, performance stats, and Slack alerts if something goes wrong.

In short, we ensure you have all the essential features with the best developer experience, plus a fully managed infrastructure and observability tools, so you can focus on building your product. Sounds good, right?

Our Predictions on the Infrastructure Industry in 2023

While the global cloud migration is ongoing, most companies are in the cloud.

PaaS companies like Heroku, Supabase, Fly.io, or Vercel have already demonstrated that IaaS cloud solutions are the new primitives that operate the web but are not necessary to interact with as a developer.

We believe that 2023 will be the year of acceleration of PaaS/Zero infrastructure solutions that aim for better developer productivity by bridging the gap between application developers and DevOps.

As swyx recently stated, dev-tools founders from 2023 and beyond benefit from a vast VC dry powder, with ~$3B remaining invested in the space.

This will result in the rise of many startups willing to disrupt the space of dev tools and infrastructure!

Also, we firmly believe in Vercel’s Framework-defined infrastructure, an extension of the PaaS or alias of the Zero infrastructure movement.

In 2023, infrastructure will rhythm with “Zero infrastructure”.

What word defines the state of infrastructure in 2023?

Empowerment.

Devtools founders are willing to empower developers to “Build in a weekend, Scale to millions” (copyright to Supabase) without specific infrastructure knowledge.

As Software is eating the world, it is now eating the infrastructure world, as a natural evolution from static infrastructure, Infrastructure as code (Terraform) that required DevOps and the introduction of the PaaS by Heroku (power to the devs!), and now Zero infrastructure solutions.

Why we decided to participate in HackerNoon's Startup of the Year awards

HackerNoon is the place for pioneers, where new technology gets discovered, debated, and loved.

We had to be here and share our vision and journey with you!

Final Thoughts

We are just getting started!

We launched Defer while participating in Y Combinator and counting dozens of customers and a growing community of hundreds of developers.

We build Defer in the open and would love to get you onboard in this journey; it is time to make background jobs, workflows, and CRONs modern!