Distributed Spring Batch Without a Message Broker
InfoQ, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
How to scale Spring Batch across a small cluster using the existing relational database for coordination instead of Kafka or RabbitMQ.
This InfoQ article shows how to run fault-tolerant, distributed Spring Batch jobs using only the relational database Spring Batch already needs, rather than remote partitioning over a message broker.
The pattern sizes work to the live node count, assigns a master for each execution, and claims partitions with compare-and-set writes so none is lost, while heartbeats and two-phase recovery handle node failure.
Transferable work must be idempotent, and non-transferable work fails rather than moving.
The author says a broker is still the better choice for very large clusters or sub-second latency.