Make video-job creation idempotent at the point where your API durably creates or identifies a job. Give each logical submission a stable idempotency key, bind it to the request parameters and resulting job, and return that same job when the client retries. Then protect the queue and worker separately: a queue’s duplicate-suppression feature does not guarantee that a video is encoded only once.
Why a client retry can create a second video job
A timeout or dropped connection leaves the client uncertain, not the server. The API may have created the job and sent a response that never reached the client. If the client submits the request again without a way to identify it as the same operation, the server may create a second job.
Idempotency resolves that uncertainty: repeated requests for one logical submission return the recorded outcome instead of performing job creation again. Stripe describes this approach for safely retrying requests after connection failures in its idempotent requests reference.
Use an idempotency key for each logical submission
Create and reuse the key on the client
Generate one unpredictable key when the user initiates a submission, then reuse it for every network retry of that submission. A distinct user action to create another job must get a new key. Stripe recommends a V4 UUID or another sufficiently random string and says not to put sensitive data in the key.
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The key identifies an operation, not a person, account, or video forever. Persist it across retries for long enough to cover the client’s retry behavior; do not generate a fresh key for each HTTP attempt, or the server cannot recognize those attempts as duplicates.
Bind the key to the request
On the server, associate the key with a fingerprint of the job parameters and the job record or saved response. The fingerprint should represent the meaningful inputs to the operation—for example, the selected source and processing options—so accidental reuse of a key for a different request is detected.
When the same key arrives with different parameters, return a conflict or equivalent error rather than silently creating or changing a job. Stripe and Square both document parameter-mismatch errors for idempotency keys, though their exact behavior and API contracts differ: Stripe and Square.
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Make key claiming and job creation atomic
The key check must happen at the durable write boundary, not only in application memory or a preliminary lookup. Concurrent copies of the same request can arrive before either has finished. Use a database uniqueness constraint or equivalent atomic claim so only one request can own a given scoped key, and ensure the winning claim is tied to the job that is created or identified.
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A practical record needs enough information to determine whether a key has been seen, whether the incoming parameters match, which job is associated with it, and what response or status should be replayed. Key scope should be explicit—for example, scoped to the authenticated customer or tenant—so unrelated callers cannot collide or retrieve one another’s job result.
After the first request commits, a matching retry should receive the same job identifier and an appropriate current status or saved response. It must not receive a newly created “accepted” job simply because the original response was lost.
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Keep durable job creation connected to queue dispatch
Creating the database row and publishing a queue message are separate operations unless your architecture deliberately coordinates them. If the row commits but publishing fails, the job can remain stranded; if publishing succeeds but the API later treats creation as failed, a retry can enqueue duplicate work.
One common design option is a transactional outbox: commit the job and an event to publish in the same database transaction, then have a dispatcher publish outstanding events and mark them delivered. This is an implementation pattern, not a guarantee supplied by a queue vendor. Whatever pattern you choose, make dispatch repeatable and ensure consumers can safely handle a message more than once.
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Job-creation idempotency prevents duplicate logical jobs, but it does not prevent the same queue message from being delivered twice or a worker from retrying after a partial failure. AWS documents standard Amazon SQS delivery as at least once and best-effort ordered; messages may arrive more than once or out of order. Its guidance also warns that a consumer that does not finish before the visibility timeout expires may allow another consumer to process the same message: SQS outage recovery.
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- Give each job a durable state and use guarded transitions so only a worker that successfully claims an eligible state can begin or finalize the job.
- Make side effects repeat-safe. For example, write outputs to a job-specific location and make completion updates conditional on the job still being in a valid state.
- Set the visibility timeout to reflect real processing duration and extend it while long-running work continues, as AWS recommends in its recovery guidance.
- Route repeatedly failing messages to a dead-letter queue so they can be investigated rather than retried indefinitely.
Choose queue deduplication with its limits in view
Queue-level deduplication can reduce certain duplicate deliveries, but it is not a substitute for durable application checks. Amazon SQS standard queues are at-least-once and best-effort ordered. FIFO queues preserve ordering and provide a deduplication mechanism, but the outage-recovery documentation specifies a five-minute deduplication interval; a retry after that interval can create a new message. Consumer redelivery remains a concern if processing exceeds the visibility timeout. See AWS’s SQS outage-recovery documentation.
| Queue approach | Documented behavior | What your video-job system still needs |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon SQS standard | At-least-once delivery; best-effort ordering (AWS SQS outage-recovery documentation) | Repeat-safe consumers, durable job-state checks, and handling for possible redelivery |
| Amazon SQS FIFO | Ordering and a five-minute deduplication interval (AWS SQS outage-recovery documentation) | Application-level deduplication beyond the window and protection against redelivery after visibility timeout expiry |
AWS lists media resizing or encoding among SQS background-work use cases, but these queue properties do not amount to an end-to-end guarantee that a particular video encoding runs exactly once.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Set retry rules and key retention deliberately
Retry transient failures, not requests that cannot succeed unchanged. AWS ECS guidance generally recommends backoff for transient 500-series failures and generally advises against retrying 400-series errors that indicate invalid parameters or permissions. Stripe also notes that it does not save an idempotent result when validation fails or when a concurrent request prevents endpoint execution, so those cases differ from replaying a completed request: AWS ECS idempotency and Stripe idempotent requests.
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There is no universal provider TTL that should dictate an application’s retention. Stripe says keys may be pruned after they are at least 24 hours old; Amazon ECS documents a 24-hour TTL for the RunTask client token. ECS also documents a maximum of 64 ASCII characters for that token. These are API-specific behaviors and limits, not industry-wide guarantees: Stripe and Amazon ECS.
Choose retention to cover your actual retry horizon, including delayed retries, and retain enough job history to prevent an old retry from being mistaken for a new submission. If you delete key records while clients may still retry, the same logical action can create another job.
Quick Recap
Implementation checklist
- Client: generate a random idempotency key once per user submission; reuse it for retries, and create a new key for a new submission.
- API: authenticate and validate the request, then atomically claim the scoped key and associate it with a request fingerprint and job.
- Duplicate request: if the key and fingerprint match, return the existing job identifier and status or saved response; if they differ, reject the request as a conflict.
- Dispatch: connect durable job creation to queue publication with a recoverable design, and allow dispatch attempts to repeat safely.
- Worker: claim job state with guarded transitions, make output and completion effects repeat-safe, and account for queue redelivery and processing time.
- Operations: use bounded retries with backoff for transient failures, dead-letter repeated failures, and monitor stale jobs and repeated delivery.
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