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Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform

temporal.io

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform

#11

I 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…

It's interesting that you mention workflows and serverless together. In this regard, have you looked at things like AWS Step Functions and Azure Logic Apps? You get the best of both worlds - state machines with excellent workflow management tools along with the flexibility and cost effectiveness of AWS Lambda in the background.

Talking of "Serverless Revolution", I think we are going to see more of such abstractions as things evolve. Abstractions and tools built upon serverless functions that are going to cater more closely to problems being solved rather than worrying about managing new-found complexity of the functions themselves.

Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform

#15

Has anyone here used it for anything serious? Looks interesting but also a lot of buzzwords...

I suspect it is here on HN (or the timing is a coincidence) because it was mentioned my mitchellh as a component of what is powering the Hashicorp Cloud offerings in a comment here mid-last week.

Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform

#19

Has anyone here used it for anything serious? Looks interesting but also a lot of buzzwords...

Outside of what we disclosed via case studies, Snapchat, Mitchell and Bob Muglia said publicly... I can tell you at least 10 fortune 100 companies run on our tech :)

Re: Temporal: open-source microservices orchestration platform

#20

I 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…

The visual interface for workflow definition is more hassle than benefit. The majority of such applications' complexity is not in the sequencing of operations but in state management, expressions, data manipulation, parameter passing, and retry policies. None of this is visible in the diagram. So engineers have to use UI/DSL to design the flow, but then implement most of the complex logic in non strongly typed code as parameter passing is usually using a map.

Temporal represents all the business logic in one place in the programming language of your choice. All parameter passing is strongly typed.

I see people advocating visual representation for workflows. But if it is so great for programming in general, why they don't advocate the same for systems programming, for example? Linux kernel in JSON/XML anyone?

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