Take My Money

Running a Background Job

All of our failure mitigation so far has one limiting factor: the time needed to respond to a web request. As the application currently stands, we’re making our Stripe API call inside our user’s HTTP request, which is slow. If the Stripe API gave us a temporary error, our best response would be to retry the request in a few moments, but we can’t necessarily do that in the space of a typical web request.

Moving our payment processing to a background job, however, allows us to get some response back to the user more quickly, as well as gives us more leeway for robust error handling. Using a background job also makes it easier to integrate other tasks, such as sending a receipt back to the user or integrating with reporting ...