It is a blast. Although we had our concerns because you can't see what's inside a Beanstalkd queue (duh, because it's a queue), but building a system for monitoring the failures was not a big deal.

And of course the tubes rock. Now I can build a separate tube for each retry, I can set different priorities for the tubes (so the more fail prone tubes won't block all workers), I can set a deadline for a job to finish and if the worker dies in the middle the job will be returned for the other workers. And best of all, I can monitor all tubes nicely with Graphite.