# Job Queue

> Standalone Activities adds the ability to execute any Temporal Activity as a top-level primitive without the full overhead of a Workflow.

## What is a Job Queue?

A job is a single, discrete unit of work that runs asynchronously in the background such as sending an email, processing a webhook, syncing data, or executing a single function reliably.

A job queue is the system that manages these jobs: accepting work, dispatching it to workers, retrying on failure, and providing visibility into what's running and what failed.

**[Standalone Activities](/standalone-activity) are Temporal's job queue.**

They let you use Temporal Activities as background jobs, in addition to using the same Activities as steps inside a Workflow. You write an Activity once and can run it either as a background job or as part of a multi-step Workflow.

Under the hood, Standalone Activities use Temporal's [Task Queues](/task-queue) for dispatching work to Workers.

Temporal provides stronger guarantees, better visibility, and more control than traditional job queues - while remaining cost-effective for high-volume use cases and offering a clean upgrade path to multi-step workflow orchestration.

### Overview

Standalone Activities add the ability to execute any Temporal Activity as a top-level Activity Execution for durable job processing.

#### Unified programming model & worker deployment

- Write an Activity once and use it anywhere - with a unified Activity programming model
- Optional heartbeats support checkpointing for long-running jobs
- Deploy to an Activity Worker once, and invoke standalone or from within a Workflow

#### Execution lifecycle

- Jobs are submitted as Standalone Activity Executions
- Each job is durably persisted with Temporal reliability, so jobs are not lost
- Jobs are scheduled with priority, fairness, deduplication and no head-of-line blocking
- Workers poll task queues and execute Activities (you run your own Workers)
- Temporal ensures retries, timeouts, and exponential backoff policy is enforced

#### Observability & lifecycle controls

- Full job visibility (list, search) with detailed execution state, retry count, errors & results
- OpenMetrics support
- Lifecycle controls: cancel, pause, unpause, reset, terminate
- Manual completion for external integrations & on-call management

## Next steps

Learn more about [Standalone Activity concepts, features, and limitations](/standalone-activity), or jump to a language-specific quickstart:

- [Go SDK - Standalone Activities quickstart and code sample](/develop/go/activities/standalone-activities)
- [Python SDK - Standalone Activities quickstart and code sample](/develop/python/activities/standalone-activities)
- [.NET SDK - Standalone Activities quickstart and code sample](/develop/dotnet/activities/standalone-activities)
- [Java SDK - Standalone Activities quickstart and code sample](/develop/java/activities/standalone-activities)
- [TypeScript SDK - Standalone Activities quickstart and code sample](/develop/typescript/activities/standalone-activities)