Don't trying to by cynical, but decoupling calls from external systems is the bare minimum you need to put in place; not only for the problem at hand, but to pr

Don't trying to by cynical, but decoupling calls from external systems is the bare minimum you need to put in place; not only for the problem at hand, but to protect your system from systems you don't own. For the record, we use beanstalkd[1] with both php and node workers. Getting millions of external notifications every day without any major issue. Internally, we use the same design, this time to completely decouple our workers from the persistence layer. Our major benefit in this case was the ability to perform database maintenance without taking the service down. Anyway, I good read and a simple, yet effective solution. [1] https://github.com/kr/beanstalkd https://github.com/kr/beanstalkd