Overview of Ant: a new background job processing library for Elixir

This article introduces Ant, a new background job processing library for Elixir that is designed to be simple and easy to use. The author, Mike Andrianov, explains the motivation behind creating this library, emphasizing the need for a solution that allows job persistence, retry mechanisms for failed jobs, and the ability to handle multiple concurrent processes elegantly using Elixir's capabilities. Ant is built on Mnesia, a distributed database system native to Erlang, and is presented along with a practical example demonstrating how it can be used to manage tasks such as sending emails to a large list of leads asynchronously. The article includes code examples, explaining how to set up the library, configure workers, and monitor job statuses. Additionally, challenges regarding data persistence in cloud environments and the lack of resources for Mnesia usage in web development are discussed, with a call for community feedback to improve the library further.