Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
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Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#2I am super excited about Temporal. I think one of the biggest underacknowledged problems in business software is the way executional details pervade business logic. As soon as your critical logic doesn't simply exist in a request-response logic, it becomes fragmented over queues, scheduled jobs, ETLs, microservices, functions, etc. The actual processes that matter become Rube Goldberg machines that are hard to understand, maintain, observe, debug, and analyze. Not to mention hard to depict to the actual end user.
When I read the article "Why the Serverless Revolution Has Stalled" [1] on here a couple weeks ago, my reaction was that the reason is that serverless doesn't solve the business logic issue. Serverless removes operational details of servers, but often exacerbates process fragmentation. And the need to have "serverful" operational expertise is replaced by the need for serverless expertise. At least right now, this new expertise is far from trivial.
I haven't yet used Temporal, but I've spent a lot of time evaluating it, and its predecessor, Cadence. The idea is to model long-running business logic essentially as procedures, in ordinary code. These are called Workflows, and must be free of external effects. External effects are carried out by Activities, and the scheduling and tracking of results are handled by the Temporal runtime. The upshot is that you get to write workflows as though they have no time constraints. It's like async programming, but liberated from the confines of a OS process or machine.
If it turns out to be a useful home for business logic (I understand that it has at Uber), I think the next frontier is integrating it within UI frameworks. I'm imagining the next Rails being something like Next.js + Temporal. I still have a bunch of questions in my mind, like how to decide which data lives in Temporal vs. a OLTP database. Someone with more experience using Temporal probably could better answer this.
One of the reasons I'm particularly interested in this topic is because my company, Better.com, uses our own homebuilt workflow engine to model the days-long, multi-user business project of mortgage origination. In our case, our workflow engine is actually built as part of a full-stack framework that goes well beyond Temporal in scope, but it's not built as a generic platform, and we look at Temporal for inspiration on where things might be going.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/articles/serverless-stalled/
[2] I discuss this a bit here https://www.themuse.com/advice/engineering-manager-better-al...
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#3Surprised to see Ruby and PHP SDKs, but no JS.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#4I am super excited about Temporal. I think one of the biggest underacknowledged problems in business software is the way executional details pervade business logic. As soon as your critical logic doesn't simply exist in a request-response logic, it becomes fragmented over queues, scheduled jobs, ETLs, microservices, functions, etc. The actual processes that matter become Rube Goldberg machines that are hard to unders…
You might be interested in looking into Camunda, which does similar things. It's very quick and easy to set up detailed process flows which model and track multi-step transactions via microservices.
It also has a great visual interface using BPMN for understanding where your processes are in a flow. I don't see anything like that in Temporal.
https://camunda.com/why-camunda/
Incidentally, an iteration of Camunda called Zeebe leverages event-sourcing to work more efficiently at scale.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#5“Temporal” is also the name of a JS Date object alternative being proposed.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#6I am super excited about Temporal. I think one of the biggest underacknowledged problems in business software is the way executional details pervade business logic. As soon as your critical logic doesn't simply exist in a request-response logic, it becomes fragmented over queues, scheduled jobs, ETLs, microservices, functions, etc. The actual processes that matter become Rube Goldberg machines that are hard to unders…
You might be interested in looking into Camunda, which does similar things. It's very quick and easy to set up detailed process flows which model and track multi-step transactions via microservices. It also has a great visual interface using BPMN for understanding where your processes are in a flow. I don't see anything like that in Temporal. https://camunda.com/why-camunda/ Incidentally, an iteration of Camunda call…
Camunda is pretty nice and I have proposed it for projects, but it was shot down almost every time because 'BPM visual modelling is old-world' (it kind of says that on the homepage as well; 'modernize your legacy BPM systems'). We did a prototype for a big insurer in the UK and that went well, but covid+brexit killed the project altogether. It is nice to work with and to just toss it aside because of BPM modelling (and the charts belonging to them that make people from the industry who encountered them early 2000s cringe) is shortsighted (considering you can do everything in code). It is just that when people read the homepage, I guess from comments partners/clients made, it looks like going back 15+ years when you had fat java applet clients doing BPM and it always turning into a mess in the end.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#7I am super excited about Temporal. I think one of the biggest underacknowledged problems in business software is the way executional details pervade business logic. As soon as your critical logic doesn't simply exist in a request-response logic, it becomes fragmented over queues, scheduled jobs, ETLs, microservices, functions, etc. The actual processes that matter become Rube Goldberg machines that are hard to unders…
> Serverless removes operational details of servers, but often exacerbates process fragmentation. And the need to have "serverful" operational expertise is replaced by the need for serverless expertise.
I totally agree. As a consultant working with multiple companies, I see a slowly increasing number of Serverless applications. The code always looked bloated, with no chance of ever being migrated off the original cloud platform due to all the proprietary APIs in use. There was also no way to run any of them locally without extensive configuration. Serverless has a future, but this is not it.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be interested in looking into Camunda, which does similar things. It's very quick and easy to set up detailed process flows which model and track multi-step transactions via microservices. It also has a great visual interface using BPMN for understanding where your processes are in a flow. I don't see anything like that in Temporal. https://camunda.com/why-camunda/ Incidentally, an iteration of Camunda call…
Camunda is pretty nice and I have proposed it for projects, but it was shot down almost every time because 'BPM visual modelling is old-world' (it kind of says that on the homepage as well; 'modernize your legacy BPM systems'). We did a prototype for a big insurer in the UK and that went well, but covid+brexit killed the project altogether. It is nice to work with and to just toss it aside because of BPM modelling (a…
It's interesting - I clearly never encountered them the first time around, and to be quite honest when I discovered them alongside Camunda I found them pretty refreshing.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#9Surprised to see Ruby and PHP SDKs, but no JS.
I am waiting for their .NET SDK.
Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform
#10I am super excited about Temporal. I think one of the biggest underacknowledged problems in business software is the way executional details pervade business logic. As soon as your critical logic doesn't simply exist in a request-response logic, it becomes fragmented over queues, scheduled jobs, ETLs, microservices, functions, etc. The actual processes that matter become Rube Goldberg machines that are hard to unders…
You might be interested in looking into Camunda, which does similar things. It's very quick and easy to set up detailed process flows which model and track multi-step transactions via microservices. It also has a great visual interface using BPMN for understanding where your processes are in a flow. I don't see anything like that in Temporal. https://camunda.com/why-camunda/ Incidentally, an iteration of Camunda call…
+1 for Camunda.
I've used it for microservices orchestration previously and it works great.
I'm excited for Zeebe too but it's a bit immature atm.