airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien

1 Billion Jobs Daily with Zero Dependencies Java

Sep 28, 2025
Ronald Dehuysser, creator of JobRunner, discusses revolutionizing job scheduling with a focus on efficiency and sustainability. He shares insights on processing 1 billion jobs daily while utilizing carbon-aware scheduling linked to European energy data. Ronald dives into JobRunner's evolution from open-source to a professional model with advanced features, and emphasizes Java's performance over Python. The conversation also touches on the implications of serverless architectures, operational risks in critical sectors, and future opportunities in edge computing and WebAssembly.
Ask episode
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
INSIGHT

Bytecode Analysis Enables Serializable Jobs

  • JobRunner captures lambda closures by analyzing bytecode with ASM to extract service, method, and parameters for persistence.
  • This enables serializing job state as JSON and replaying it reliably across nodes.
ANECDOTE

A Bug That Stopped Cancer Results

  • Ronald once caused a bug that temporarily stopped delivery of cancer results and then rushed to get users to upgrade to the fixed version.
  • That incident prompted him to buy professional liability insurance and take support seriously.
ADVICE

Persist Jobs As JSON With Retries

  • Serialize captured method arguments to JSON for simplicity and debuggability when persisting jobs.
  • Store job state in a database and use exponential backoff with automatic retries up to defined limits.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Get the app