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Operating Event Outbox Workers for Customer Messaging
Operational guidance for outbox workers that drive customer-facing messaging pipelines with predictable latency and failure recovery.
Durability only matters if workers are actually running
A durable outbox table is necessary, but not sufficient. You need continuously running consumers with backoff, reclaim logic, and clear alerting.
Treat workers as core infrastructure: deploy separately, monitor queue depth, and test stop/restart behavior regularly.
Define latency and retry expectations explicitly
For customer messaging, target latency should be documented and tied to polling interval, batch size, and per-handler processing budgets.
Retries need idempotency protections and dead-letter visibility so failures do not silently loop forever.
Instrument the full lifecycle
Track state transitions across queued, processing, delivered, and failed events. Correlate these with provider callbacks for end-to-end visibility.
When you can trace every event lifecycle, operational debugging becomes fast and deterministic instead of guesswork.