Back to Insights
Software Engineering•December 30, 2023•10 min read

Temporal: Reliable Workflow Orchestration

Temporal provides durable workflow execution surviving failures and long-running processes.

#temporal#workflows#orchestration#distributed-systems

Temporal orchestrates complex workflows with automatic failure handling. Workflows survive process restarts. Activities execute with configurable retries. State persists durably throughout execution.

Workflow Concepts

Workflows define business logic as code. Activities perform side effects. Signals send data to running workflows. Queries read workflow state without affecting execution.

  • Write workflows as deterministic code
  • Implement activities for external interactions
  • Configure retry policies for resilience
  • Use signals for external communication
  • Monitor workflows with the Temporal UI

Use Cases

Long-running processes span hours or days. Transaction sagas coordinate distributed systems. Scheduled jobs execute reliably. Human-in-the-loop workflows wait for input.

Tags

temporalworkflowsorchestrationdistributed-systemsreliability