Hangfire - .NET background processing made easy

The cloud project I am currently working had the requirement that we needed to ingest, process, and write several gigs of data in a CosmosDB every 15 min.

For the processing part, we needed something that could scale, since the amount of data was proportional to the number of customers we have hooked up to the system.

Since the project consisted mainly of C# .NET Core developers, the initial processing was done using C# using async operations. This worked well, but was not really scalable - one in the team suggested to use Hangire.io for the processing, which turned out was a great fit for our use case. (Wished it was my idea, but it was not…)

Hangfire is an open source .NET Core library which manages distributed background jobs. It does this by starting a Server in the application where jobs can be submitted. Job types include: fire and forget, delayed jobs, recurring jobs, and continuations.

Hangfire uses a database to ensure information and metadata about jobs are persisted. In our case, we simply use an Azure SQL server. Multiple instances of the application hosting the Hangfire server helps with the processing of the jobs.

This architecture makes it possible to e.g. submit a job for each connected customer, which is processed by one or more nodes. If resources becomes a problem, we horizontal scale up the application to include more instances - which can even be done automatically depending on CPU load or other metric. In our case, we use Kubernetes for that.

What I really like about Hangfire is the fact that one can simply start with one instance of the application hosting the Hangfire server, and scale up later if needed.

Oh! and Hangfire comes with its own integrated dashboard that allows one to see submitted jobs. Neat!

Although we are not yet in production, my gut feeling is good on this one. Highly recommended!