I'm a little confused about this. I have a couple of tasks that I would like to run asynchronously, for example my inventory sync integration. For this I have implemented delayed job, but I realize that I need to run rake jobs:work on Heroku for this. I can use the Heroku scheduler to run this rake task every 10 minutes. My question is; if I create rake tasks to run i.e. my inventory sync method, do I still need delayed job? My understanding is that heroku scheduler kicks off 'one off dynos'.
Instead of using delayed job, could I not just kick off the sync method directly since a separate dyno is used anyway? What is the added value of delayed job here?
Heroku's Scheduler replaces what cron would handle on a typical server. Delayed Job or Sidekiq are for processing jobs asynchronously from your app, not a timed schedule.
The reason you use a worker & run these jobs on the back-end is so that your server can return a response as soon as is possible rather than making the user wait for some potentially unnecessarily long running process to finish (lots of queries, outbound e-mail, external API requests, etc.).
Ex, scheduler can run analytics or updates from a script every hour or day, but delayed job can not.