I'm new to Cloud Hosting / PaaS and have a question regarding workers. I would like to host an app at Fortrabbit and under http://www.fortrabbit.com/pricing (click on Custom) I can choose a Worker. I googled about "cloud hosting worker" and similar stuff but could not find any explanations. On their website I didn't find anything about that either. Could you please tell me what does this "thing" do for me as if I'm your little brother?!
Thanking you in advance.
A worker is a generic term for a process that does something other than serve web requests. It may process a queue, run scheduled jobs using cron, process files, or any number of other support-type activities. It generally does not interface with users or listen on the network. Kind of a catch all term.
Ben already answered the question perfectly. I'd like to add some more informations:
The general idea is to separate your "front end tasks" (web) from the "backend tasks" (worker). Certain actions that your application needs to perform take longer to execute and you don't want your users to wait for that.
Use cases are: Generating caches, sending transactional mails, communicating with remote APIs, RSS feed reading and parsing, image processing, uploading data to external storage.
For PaaS (cloud hosting) providers workers are an extra decoupled service. Please note that the actual implementation (and wordings) differs from vendor to vendor. You should be able to queue and schedule your worker tasks.
