Our weekly spotlight of a cool project in the open source community that are looking for exposure or assistance. If you’d like your project to be featured, hit reply and let us know about it.

Verk is a asynchronous job processing system written in Elixir. Its main goal is to ensure that a job is executed no matter what happens. Jobs do not exist in-memory only, so users can safely enqueue jobs and expect them to be run at least once.

Verk borrows heavily from Sidekiq/Resque. A client from these projects can enqueue new jobs to Verk, and have them executed in Elixir. This creates a great path for those who are migrating Rails applications to Elixir, or who have mixed deploys and want to scale a single background job queue. Verk has already processed billions of jobs on a single deploy since its conception, and it has its own Verk Web interface written in Phoenix.

Verk instances today are standalone and do not communicate as a cluster. The next big step for the project is ensuring Verk instances can work together knowing what each instance is executing. So for example pausing a specific queue should pause for every instance and scaling up and down should automatically capture lost jobs etc.

Being able to work as a standalone is a boon to those deploying to services like Heroku, where Erlang clustering isn’t feasible.

Check out the open issues and jump in.

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by Josh Adams