What is Batch Processing?

Batch processing is a computing paradigm older than modern automation tooling, but it remains the right model whenever latency is not the priority and throughput or resource efficiency is. Payroll runs, nightly data warehouse loads, and large-scale report generation are natural batch jobs — the business doesn't need the result the instant a single input changes, it needs the aggregate result reliably at a known time. The practical engineering concerns in batch processing are idempotency (can the same batch be safely re-run if it fails partway through, without duplicating already-processed items) and checkpointing (can a failed batch resume from where it stopped instead of restarting entirely). Systems that get these wrong turn an occasional batch failure into a much larger incident than the original failure warranted.