A job is a class that represents work Laravel can perform now or later, such as sending email, processing an upload, generating a report, or calling an external service. A queue stores dispatched jobs until a worker processes them outside the web request.

Queues make requests faster and more reliable by moving slow work to background workers. Laravel supports several queue backends and lets jobs define connections, queues, delays, middleware, and retry behavior. Production workers should be managed by a process monitor and restarted or reloaded when deploying new code.