Job Queue

What is a Job Queue in Temporal?

A job is a single, discrete unit of work that runs asynchronously in the background such as sending an email, processing a webhook, syncing data, or executing a long-running task.

A job queue is the system that manages these jobs: accepting work, dispatching it to workers, retrying on failure, and providing visibility into what's running and what failed.

Standalone Activities are Temporal's job queue.

They let you use Temporal Activities as background jobs, in addition to using the same Activities as steps inside a Workflow. You write an Activity once and can run it either as a background job or as part of a multi-step Workflow.

Temporal provides stronger guarantees, better visibility, and more control than traditional job queues - while remaining cost-effective for high-volume use cases and offering a clean upgrade path to multi-step workflow orchestration.

Overview

Standalone Activities add the ability to execute any Temporal Activity as a top-level Activity Execution for durable job processing.

Unified programming model & worker deployment

• Write an Activity once and use it anywhere - with a unified Activity programming model
• Optional heartbeats support checkpointing for long-running jobs
• Deploy to an Activity Worker once, and invoke standalone or from within a Workflow

Execution lifecycle

• Jobs are submitted as Standalone Activity Executions
• Each job is durably persisted with Temporal reliability, so jobs are not lost
• Jobs are scheduled with priority, fairness, deduplication and no head of line blocking
• Workers poll task queues and execute Activities (you run your own Workers)
• Temporal ensures retries, timeouts, and exponential backoff policy is enforced

Observability & lifecycle controls

• Full job visibility (list, search) with detailed execution state, retry count, errors & results
• OpenMetrics support
• Lifecycle controls: cancel, pause, unpause, reset, terminate
• Manual completion for external integrations & on-call management