docs/en-US/asynchronous-commands.xml

<section id="asynchronous-commands">
		<title>Asynchronous Commands</title>
	<para>Starting in CloudStack 2.x, the notion of asynchronous commands has been introduced. Commands are designated as asynchronous when they can potentially take a long period of time to complete such as creating a snapshot or disk volume.  They differ from synchronous commands by the following:
		</para>
		<itemizedlist>
			<listitem><para>They are identified in the API Reference by an (A).</para></listitem>
			<listitem><para>They will immediately return a job ID to refer to the job that will be responsible in processing the command.</para></listitem>
			<listitem><para>If executed as a "create" resource command, it will return the resource ID as well as the job ID.</para>
				<para>You can periodically check the status of the job by making a simple API call to the command, queryAsyncJobResult and passing in the job ID.</para>
			</listitem>
		</itemizedlist>
		<xi:include href="job-status.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" />
		<xi:include href="asynchronous-commands-example.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" />
	</section>