One of the core building blocks when designing solutions for SharePoint is Timer Jobs. These have been a part of the core product for many years now. Microsoft themselves use these within SharePoint for most of the long running processes as well as what I would call the “heavy lifting” elements of SharePoint. An example would be things like content type syndication which utilizes multiple jobs for pushing the content types, as well as the subscriber jobs allow the content types to be bought down to the site.