The technology disclosed relates to providing strong ordering in multi-stage processing of near real-time (NRT) data streams. In particular, it relates to maintaining current batch-stage information for a batch at a grid-scheduler in communication with a grid-coordinator that controls dispatch of batch-units to the physical threads for a batch-stage. This includes operating a computing grid, and queuing data from the NRT data streams as batches in pipelines for processing over multiple stages in the computing grid. Also included is determining, for a current batch-stage, batch-units pending dispatch, in response to receiving the current batch-stage information; identifying physical threads that processed batch-units for a previous batch-stage on which the current batch-stage depends and have registered pending tasks for the current batch-stage; and dispatching the batch-units for the current batch-stage to the identified physical threads subsequent to complete processing of the batch-units for the previous batch-stage.