Short answer: Yes. With Docket enabled, you can safely run multiple Prefect background services—one on each VM—and they’ll coordinate work without duplicating it. Key points - Use a shared Docket backend (Redis) across all instances - Set

PREFECT_SERVER_DOCKET_URL=redis://<host>:6379/<db>

- Do not use the default

memory://

when running multiple instances (it will duplicate work) - Two supported patterns: 1) Recommended: Run multiple API replicas with services disabled, and run one or more dedicated background-service processes - API replicas:

prefect server start --host 0.0.0.0 --no-services

- Background services (on one or more VMs/containers):

prefect server services start

2) Acceptable: Keep background services enabled on every API replica; with Redis-backed Docket they will still coordinate and not double-execute. The trade-off is shared CPU/memory with the API. - For multi-instance deployments also ensure: - A shared Postgres database via

PREFECT_API_DATABASE_CONNECTION_URL

- Run DB migrations once, then set

PREFECT_API_DATABASE_MIGRATE_ON_START=false

on all long-lived replicas - Helpful CLI checks: -

prefect server start --help

shows

--no-services

-

prefect server services --help

shows

start

,

stop

, and

ls

(list) subcommands Docs and references - Server concepts and self-hosting: Prefect 3 Server concepts - Server CLI: Server CLI guide - Settings reference (Docket): Settings reference: ServerDocketSettings If you want, I can share a minimal docker-compose that runs multiple API replicas plus one or more background-service containers using Redis-backed Docket.