Uses Cases

Didact is ideal for several different use cases.

Background Jobs

Asynchronous, parallelizable, reliable, and persistent background jobs are often a critical piece of production infrastructure for a business of any size, from the smallest to the largest of operations.

Software designed to handle this job function (pun intended) needs to be highly performant, expose a high degree of observability, capture critical logging events, and be well-documented.

Long Running Jobs

Long running tasks are also a common need for many industries. Rather than hang up an HTTP request for an overextended amount of time, many developers prefer to offload long running tasks to an asynchronous, queue-based process. Didact provides a powerful SQL-based queue with maximum obervability through Didact UI, allowing you to offload expensive operations and time-consuming work to a dedicated service on your backend and free up your client.

Scheduled Jobs / CRON Jobs

Ask any .NET developer about reoccurring scheduled jobs, and chances are they have built and launched a .NET console application on Windows task scheduler or as a Windows service. Whether it's every X minutes, the first of the month, or some obscure CRON schedule, it's a common need for a team of any industry, for customers or for internal use, and often times very critical to business operations. Scheduled jobs are an essential piece of any job orchestrator and a direct use case for what Didact as your .NET job orchestrator.

Data Pipelines and ETL

Perhaps under the umbrella of background jobs, many a .NET developer or data engineer find themselves needing to build some sort of data pipeline.

Moving data, transforming data, loading and unloading data: no matter what, something needs to actually orchestrate the execution of all these commands, and you need the ability to observe what's happening.

Microservices and Isolation

And speaking of background jobs and data pipelines, there is also the question of how and where you want to run them.

With other libraries like Hangfire or Quartz.NET, sure, you can run your automations inside of a main application, but what if you'd rather not do that?

These days, microservices and containerization are all the rage, and I think it would be nice to offer an orchestration solution that naturally fits into those patterns.