Runly is a platform for running background jobs in the cloud. It enables you to build and deploy background jobs with ease. Runly is perfect for long-running tasks, resource-intensive work, batch data imports/exports, and more.

Comparison to Azure Worker Roles

Azure Worker Roles is a “classic” feature of Azure that allows you to run your app standalone (without IIS). Azure Worker Roles came first and was then superseded by Azure WebJobs (although both are still supported).

Azure Worker Roles are very heavy-handed spinning up an entire virtual machine to run your background application. Runly, on the other hand, runs your background jobs utilizing a light-weight worker node. You can easily deploy your background jobs as nuget packages and Runly will distribute the package to be available to run on any worker node in your infrastructure while giving you lots of benefits including easily reporting progress of long-running jobs to your frontend apps out of the box.

You can run your background jobs on the same machine as your web application or scale it out to run on multiple machines in the cloud. You can even take advantage of Azure Container Instances to scale and run your worker nodes with docker.

Utilizing Runly, you can have the benefits of independently scalable background jobs without the headaches of deployment.