Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

That is, they require good taste and opinionated API design first, porting skills second. The SDK for each language ends up being substantially different.

Frontier models are not very good at this yet. I've tried. Ultimately I couldn't justify the effort when there are other workflow engines out there.

(1) You can model the equivalent of local activities and activities that run on other workers in Restate.

A local activity is a step in the workflow function. An activity supposed to run on a different worker is a function called by the workflow function. Since these calls are just Restate events, exactly-one, suspendable, this gives you a full-fledged workflow/remote-activity pattern. Including concurrency, separate retry policies, etc.

(2) Restate steps commit individually, unlike local activities.

Imagine a two-step workflow, where you want one step durable before starting the second. Account withdrawal before deposit. Restate steps allow you to do that, each step is durable committed before the next step runs.

Per Temporal's own docs, Temporal Local Activity results become durable only when the enclosing Workflow Task completes. That's different than Restate, which can durably commit every individual ctx.run before proceeding to the next step.

Making actual durable commits fast, so you can have sequences of fast durable steps building on each other is super valuable. If an agent can commit the guardrail evaluation in low milliseconds before it starts the tool call, that's great, do it. If committing this involves dispatching another workflow or activity task, the consideration is harder.

When we see someone migrate a Temporal workflow, they often end up using many more durable steps in Restate than they used activities before.

(3) Why do we consider it flexible?

(a) Virtual Objects: Keep state around across the workflow, without doing tricks like "keep the workflow running, signal only, continue_as_new" after a while. Virtual Objects are a natural way to model concurrent stateful entities.

(b) non-workflow communication patterns: We have seen users build lot's of different patterns. It can get as crazy as graphs of functions/objects sending each other durable messages. All end-to-end idempotent (or exactly once, for Virtual Object state). That is outside the hierarchical workflow/subworkflow/activity abstraction.

(4) availability and stability

I don't know where the perception with stability comes from, Restate pushes some pretty high volumes for customers, like 100k+ actions/sec.

The push model in Restate is internally dispatched through queues as well. The application just don't see it as task queues. Limits are implemented through virtual-queues in Restate 1.7.

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Of course the systems make different trade-offs. The Restate design (vqueues, push model) is took us longer to build than a task queue model would have, because it puts more work onto the dispatcher that is otherwise handled just implicitly by the worker pools.

But once it is there, it is sooo nice, in how easy it integrates into infra, and how it can handle flow-control with high hierarchical limits in ways I genuinely haven't seen in any other system achieve (see https://restate.dev/blog/announcing-restate-1-7 )