Viewing profile — sewen

We tried building a scalable and resilient cloud coding agent with @restatedev for workflows, @modal for sandboxes, @vercel for compute, and GPT-5 / Claude as the LLM. Think a mini…

I just realized I missed an important part: The primary durability for the bulk of the state comes from S3 (or similar object store). The periodic snapshots give you like an automa…

Indeed, the persistence layer is sensitive, and we do take this pretty serious. All data is persisted via RocksDB. Not only the materialized state of invocations and journals, but …

afaik, with Temporal you deploy workers. When a workflow calls an activity, the activity gets added to a queue, and the workers pull activities from queues. In Restate, there are n…

Here is a comparison to Temporal, maybe that helps with a comparison to those systems as well? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43511814

There are a few dimensions where this is different. (1) The design is a fully self-contained stack, event-driven, with its own replicated log and embedded storage engine. That lets…

The way we think about durable execution is that it is not just for long-running code, where you may want to suspend and later resume. In those cases, low-latency implementations w…

All of the Restate co-founders com from various stages of Apache Flink. Restate is in many ways a mirror image to Flink. Both are event-streaming architectures, but otherwise make …

Thank you for the kind words! The storage engine is pretty tightly integrated with the log, but the programming model allows you to attach quasi arbitrary state to keys. So see whe…

The post discusses the design considerations when building a durable execution runtime from the ground up. The goal is a highly-available, transactional, scalable, and low latency …

Yes, there is one, have a look at https://restate.dev/cloud/

This is certainly building on principles and ideas from a long history of computer science research. And yes, there are moment where you go "oh, we implicitly gave up xyz (i.e., ca…

Great question: The Virtual Objects in Restate are much like actors. They are somewhat inspired by Orleans [1], and you could call them virtual stateful actors. They blend with the…

Temporal is related, but I would say it is a subset of this. If you only consider appending results of steps of a handler, then you have something like Temporal. This here uses the…

You can catch these errors and handle them in a common try/catch manner, and because the results of `ctx.run` are recorded in the log, this is deterministic and reliable

I can see where some of that could be written more clearly. To elaborate: - We mean using one log across different concerns like state a, communication with b, lock c. Often that i…

Some clarification on what "one log" means here: - It means using one log across different concerns like state a, communication with b, lock c. Often that is in the scope of a sing…

Yes, we are assuming a log that picks linearizability at the cost of availability under partitions. Like most logs do, including Kafka, Pulsar, RedPanda, etc. The application state…

Yes, exactly right. One log per logical entity, here "payment ID". The way our open source project implements that is with a partitioned log and indexes at key-granularity, so it i…

There is nothing to coordinate for the application, because, yes, the log coordinates everything. But not globally, on the level of a single event handler execution, or a single ke…

[2] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/11/05/database-inside-out-...

That blog post is a great read as well. Truely, the log abstraction [1] and "Turning the DB inside out" [2] have been hugely influential. In a way this article here suggests to ext…