Sidekiq Enterprise

2015-08-06

After many months of development and preparation, I’m proud to announce the newest member of the Sidekiq family: Sidekiq Enterprise. Sidekiq Enteprise is targeted at large companies and businesses which are building and scaling their operations with Sidekiq. It offers a whole new level of functionality beyond what Sidekiq and Sidekiq Pro contain.

What’s New?

Four major new features:

Rate Limiting

Many Sidekiq users and customers have asked how to throttle or limit their concurrency so a 3rd party API is not crushed by a huge number of Sidekiq workers at the same time. The new Sidekiq::Limiter API allows you to declare and enforce rate limits across all your Ruby processes, Sidekiq or not:

# Allow up to 50 concurrent operations to the ERP service ERP_LIMITER = Sidekiq :: Limiter . concurrent( :erp , 50 ) def perform ( ... ) ERP_LIMITER . within_limit do Erp . do_something end end

The Limiter API allows you to limit based on concurrency or a rate limit (e.g. 5 ops per sec).

If the operation cannot be executed due to the rate limit, it will raise an error by default. If this error is raised within a Sidekiq job, Sidekiq will catch the error and reschedule the job to execute in the near future.

The Web UI has a new “Limits” tab containing a overview of registered limiters along with usage metrics or history for each.

Documentation: Rate Limiting

Periodic Jobs

Possibly the most popular 3rd party plugins are ones which add cron job-like functionality. Cron is also a common single point of failure since you typically pick one machine to run cron jobs.

Sidekiq Enterprise offers an officially supported solution for periodic jobs. Jobs are created according to the specified schedule and any Sidekiq process can pick up the job. As a side benefit, your system will no longer have that cron machine as a single point of failure. It’s dead simple to register a periodic job:

# config/initializers/sidekiq.rb Sidekiq . configure_server do | config | config . periodic do | mgr | mgr . register "* * * * *" , MinutelyWorker , retry : 1 mgr . register "*/4 * 10 * *" , OddTimedWorker , queue : 'critical' end end

Your Worker must take no arguments.

The Web UI has a new “Cron” tab containing an overview of registered periodic jobs along with their recent execution history.

Documentation: Periodic Jobs

Unique Jobs

“How do you catch a unique rabbit?”

“Unique up on him!”

Sidekiq Enterprise’s new unique jobs support will automatically de-duplicate any jobs already pending within Redis. If you create a job every time your user presses a button, you might not want a storm of clicks to create a storm of jobs.

To activate the feature, add this line:

# config/initializers/sidekiq.rb Sidekiq :: Enterprise . unique! unless Rails . env . testing?

Your workers must declare their uniqueness TTL with the unique_for option:

class MyWorker include Sidekiq :: Worker sidekiq_options unique_for : 10 . minutes def perform ( ... ) end end

The uniqueness will remain in effect until the job is successfully processed or the TTL expires. Uniqueness is based on (class, args, queue) so you can push the same class/arguments to two different queues.

Documentation: Unique Jobs

Leader Election

If you have a swarm of N Sidekiq processes, how can you run some code on a single Sidekiq? Many customers schedule a special job to run over and over but if there’s a Redis networking issue, the job can be lost and the cycle broken. With Sidekiq Enterprise you can run an infinite loop on a single Sidekiq “leader” process, elected randomly from your processes. If the leader disappears, a follower will be promoted to leader within a minute.

Documentation: Leader Election

Onboarding

Each Sidekiq Enterprise customer gets a one hour onboarding video chat session with me to help with any questions they might have and discuss any problems they might see in their application. I can help optimize Sidekiq for your application and environment.

Licensing

Sidekiq Pro’s low price means I cannot accept license changes which the lawyers at larger corporations often demand. These corporations can now purchase Sidekiq Enterprise and negotiate custom terms.

As part of this release, my lawyer has drawn up a new commercial license for Sidekiq Pro and Sidekiq Enterprise. New customers will use those licenses.

Pricing

Sidekiq Enterprise is priced on a sliding scale, based on number of threads running in your production environment. Ten processes with the default concurrency of 10 = 100 threads. Current pricing is on the Sidekiq Enterprise purchase page.

Existing Pro subscribers can contact me to upgrade to Enterprise for the prorated difference in price.

Older Pro lifetime customers will need to purchase a new Enterprise subscription in order to upgrade.

Purchasing

Many large companies have contacted me privately, asking if they can purchase without a credit card. Sadly, until now my answer was “no” because I didn’t have any other purchase workflow. Today I’m happy to say that companies can purchase Sidekiq Enterprise via the more traditional quote/purchase order/invoice workflow. Because of its lower price, Sidekiq Pro remains credit card only.

Sidekiq Pro

Sidekiq Pro is now the entry-level commercial version, with unlimited workers for $950/yr. This unmetered pricing remains a great value and something I want to maintain for smaller startups out there with limited funding. Purchasing is via credit card only but is completely automated so you can purchase and have Sidekiq Pro running in minutes.

sidekiq.org

The sidekiq.org website has been completely redesigned for the Enterprise release.

Conclusion

Sidekiq Enterprise offers not only a whole new set of features for serious Sidekiq users but also legal and support options important to large companies.

My goal here is to offer a product for all types of users: from hobbyists using Sidekiq to startups using Sidekiq Pro and larger companies using Sidekiq Enterprise. I hope one of them fits your needs too.