Danie,
I’ve discussed this approach further with the team, and want to amend my prior statement.
You certainly can have a long-lived background process that does a job (i.e. kafka consumer) via a thread in Datomic. The specific pattern to avoid would be a long running process that lives inside an ion function call (i.e. an ion function that is my-full-import).
As with any long-running process you do need to be aware of and design around how you’ll handle communication with the background job, how you’ll manage any required state, etc.