You don’t need setTimeout, cron, or Redis for delayed execution. Several event-driven and database-native options can handle this reliably:

RabbitMQ – delayed message exchange delivers events after a set delay.

Kafka – use a delay topic or connector pattern to forward messages after the delay.

AWS SQS – built-in per-message delay (up to 15 minutes) without extra server load.

Database scheduling – MySQL Event Scheduler, Postgres pg_cron, or MongoDB TTL indexes handle time-based triggers directly in the database.

Workflow engines – tools like Temporal or Durable Functions provide robust delayed workflows with retries and persistence.