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platform-engineeringruby-on-railsbackground-jobs<br>Migrating Sidekiq Background Jobs to Temporal in Ruby on Rails<br>Erik Landerholm<br>April 14, 2025 · 15 min read

Try Release for reliable, scalable environments to test complex workflows.<br>Try Release for Free<br>Migrating Sidekiq Background Jobs to Temporal in Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails developers often use Sidekiq for background processing. Sidekiq excels at handling many quick jobs concurrently, but complex workflows or long-running tasks can push its limits. Temporal , on the other hand, is a workflow orchestration engine designed for durable, stateful execution. This guide will introduce Temporal, compare it to Sidekiq, and walk through how to migrate a background job from Sidekiq to Temporal with code examples in Ruby. We'll cover what makes Temporal unique (stateful workflows, built-in retries, fault tolerance), the challenges of adopting it, and provide a step-by-step example using the temporal-ruby SDK.

What is Temporal, and How Does It Differ from Sidekiq?

Temporal is an open-source workflow orchestration platform. Unlike a traditional job queue (like Sidekiq) that simply executes jobs asynchronously, Temporal manages stateful workflows with reliability and durability. Temporal keeps track of workflow progress and guarantees completion of a job, even if workers crash or networks fail. In contrast, Sidekiq is a background job processor backed by Redis, optimized for fast, one-off tasks running in a multi-threaded worker process.

Key Differences

State and Durability

Sidekiq jobs are transient; the state is usually not persisted between steps unless you handle it yourself. Temporal workflows are durable – the workflow's state is persistently stored by the Temporal server. If a worker process dies, Temporal can resume the workflow from its last known state on another worker.

Retries and Fault Tolerance

Sidekiq can retry failed jobs a limited number of times. Temporal automatically retries failed activities until they succeed or exhaust a defined retry policy. This makes Temporal resilient to transient failures or network issues.

Workflow vs Job Model

With Sidekiq, complex job dependencies or multi-step processes require manual orchestration. Temporal offers a workflow programming model : you write a Workflow function that calls Activities (tasks) in sequence or parallel, and Temporal ensures correct ordering and state tracking. This is much easier for multi-step processes with dependencies.

Long-Running Processes

Sidekiq is optimized for quick tasks; running a job for hours or days is often problematic. Temporal workflows have no built-in time limit . A workflow can run for days, weeks, or indefinitely—Temporal persists the state continuously.

Scalability and Concurrency

Sidekiq uses multi-threading in each worker process and is excellent at running many quick jobs in parallel. Temporal's architecture scales by distributing tasks across multiple worker processes (or machines). Need to run 10,000 tasks in parallel? Temporal can fan out child workflows or activities easily, load-balancing tasks among available workers.

Visibility and Debugging

Both systems have web UIs, but Temporal's Web UI provides a complete history of each workflow execution—every step, retry, state transition—while Sidekiq's UI focuses on queued, running, or failed jobs. Temporal's detailed history is invaluable for debugging complex workflows.

Language Support

Sidekiq is Ruby-specific, tightly integrated with Rails. Temporal is multi-language , with official SDKs in Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, etc. For Ruby, you can use the community SDK (temporal-ruby) or the newer official Ruby SDK.

Summary : Sidekiq is perfect for straightforward background tasks that run quickly. Temporal is designed for stateful, durable workflows, making it far more robust for complex, long-running, or highly critical processes.

Challenges in Adopting Temporal

Despite its advantages, adopting Temporal is a paradigm shift for Rails developers coming from Sidekiq.

New Programming Model

Temporal introduces Workflows and Activities . A workflow is a function whose execution state is managed by Temporal. Activities are the tasks that actually do the work. You can't simply drop a Sidekiq job into Temporal; you need to refactor into workflows and activities. Also, workflow code must be deterministic —no direct random calls or time lookups without using Temporal APIs.

Infrastructure Overhead

Running Sidekiq involves Redis and your worker processes. Temporal is a distributed system with multiple services (the Temporal server cluster and persistence store). You must either self-host or use Temporal Cloud . This adds complexity to deployment and operations.

Learning Curve

Developers must learn new concepts: signals, queries, timers , etc. With Sidekiq, you enqueue a job. With Temporal, you...