Unpredictable traffic spikes, slow requests to a third party, and time-consuming tasks like image processing shouldn’t degrade the user facing availability of an application. In this talk, you’ll learn about different approaches to maintain high availability by offloading work into the background: background jobs, message oriented middleware based on queues, and event logs like Kafka. I’ll explain their foundations and how they compare to each other, helping you to choose the right tool for the job.