Hanzo Tasks and Queues: Durable Background Execution

The request-response cycle is the wrong abstraction for most business logic. Sending emails, processing payments, generating reports, syncing data — these are background tasks that should not block your API response. They need to be durable, retriable, and observable.

Today we are launching three background execution primitives: Tasks, Queues, and Cron.

Hanzo Tasks

Durable workflow execution with guaranteed delivery.

Tasks are functions that run to completion, even across failures:

• At-least-once execution: Tasks retry automatically on failure
• Durable state: Task state persists across retries
• Timeouts: Configurable per-task timeout with dead letter handling
• Observability: Full execution history, timing, and error tracking
• Fan-out: Trigger multiple tasks from a single event

Multi-Step Workflows

Chain tasks into workflows with dependency tracking:

const orderWorkflow = tasks.workflow('process-order', [
  { name: 'validate', fn: validateOrder },
  { name: 'charge', fn: chargePayment, dependsOn: ['validate'] },
  { name: 'fulfill', fn: createFulfillment, dependsOn: ['charge'] },
  { name: 'notify', fn: sendConfirmation, dependsOn: ['fulfill'] },
])

If charge fails, the workflow pauses and retries. If it keeps failing, it moves to dead letter for manual review. No lost orders.

Hanzo Queues

High-throughput distributed message queues:

• FIFO guaranteed: Messages processed in order
• Exactly-once processing: Deduplication built in
• Backpressure: Automatic rate limiting to protect downstream services
• Dead letter queues: Failed messages preserved for investigation

Hanzo Cron

Scheduled jobs with timezone support:

• Standard cron expressions
• Per-timezone scheduling (your cron runs at 9 AM Tokyo time, not UTC)
• Overlap protection (skip if previous run still executing)
• Execution history and alerting

Pricing

All three services share usage-based pricing:

• Free: 10K task executions/month
• Pro: $20/month — 1M executions, priority support
• Enterprise: Custom volume pricing

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Hanzo AI is Techstars '17.