IMHO, setting up RabbitMQ and Celery, especially with django-celery, ends up being much simpler and less painful than rolling any kind of custom queue/async pro

IMHO, setting up RabbitMQ and Celery, especially with django-celery, ends up being much simpler and less painful than rolling any kind of custom queue/async processing. In terms of moving parts, for most setups, you can put Celery and RabbitMQ under supervisord and almost never have to worry about them. If you don't need all the features of RabbitMQ or just don't want to deal with it, you can use any of the other broker backends: Redis (if you don't need persistence) or even with your default DB through the Django ORM.