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Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

temporal.io

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Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#21

Post by t2r3121 »

amelius wrote: post #5
dzonga wrote: post #2

in the age of agents, surely durable execution is a must. but the money being raised - what is it for ? go to market ? sponsorship & I like that temporal sponsored Crystal Palace. we've so many good durable execution engines. this is the type of VC pollution that will cause companies to end up being acquired by an Italian silverware company (bending spoons).

> but the money being raised - what is it for ? Buying DRAM?

Temporal doesn't run your AI compute for you, you bring your own hardware on prem or in your cloud account or whereever. Their SaaS is a control plane to coordinate and orchestrate the workers.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#22

Post by datadrivenangel »

a_c wrote: post #16
binlog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an async job runner that scales well. Yeah they advertise a lot of fancy features, but really what they are selling is solid failure-resistant infra. Companies could set the same thing up with an in-house team, but it’s pretty great to be able to click a button and start running workloads at tens or hundreds of thousands of RPS without needing to figure out the internals.

Can I understand it as a performant celery with a UI?

With better ergonomics around handling failures.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#23

Post by binlog »

a_c wrote: post #16
binlog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an async job runner that scales well. Yeah they advertise a lot of fancy features, but really what they are selling is solid failure-resistant infra. Companies could set the same thing up with an in-house team, but it’s pretty great to be able to click a button and start running workloads at tens or hundreds of thousands of RPS without needing to figure out the internals.

Can I understand it as a performant celery with a UI?

Not the same thing, because celery and the like are sdk-level abstractions that need you to plug in your own queue (usually Redis, Kafka) and all other components. The Temporal server deployment includes the full control plane, queue, persistent database, UI and everything else. So you only need to manage your worker boxes.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#24

Post by tomp »

penciltwirler wrote: post #17
a_c wrote: post #9

Can someone shed some lights on what temporal does? Their blog says [1] Durable Execution offers three key benefits: It improves application reliability by providing fault tolerance. It simplifies code by allowing it to focus on the goal instead of potential problems. It accelerates development by eliminating the need to write complex error-handling logic. So... like exception handling? or something like erlang's let…

I think it's useful for implementing Sagas https://temporal.io/blog/saga-pattern-made-easy Basically, a multi-step event handling system, where the data could be spread across multiple databases/systems, so there's no way to rollback a transaction atomically across all the databases. Instead, you explicitly codify "compensations" to undo your previous commits so that you eventually end up in a consistent state. Tempo…

Does it actually work?

In a past job, they tried to implement a similar thing on much lower scale with bidirectional database migrations.

Fortunately, they were mostly ran in one direction.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#25

Post by zachncst »

a_c wrote: post #9

Can someone shed some lights on what temporal does? Their blog says [1] Durable Execution offers three key benefits: It improves application reliability by providing fault tolerance. It simplifies code by allowing it to focus on the goal instead of potential problems. It accelerates development by eliminating the need to write complex error-handling logic. So... like exception handling? or something like erlang's let…

Asking what temporal is? The founders (Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas) originally made Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), Azure Durable Task Framework (DTF), and Uber Cadence. Temporal is the latest in the long line of workflow systems they've built. It's a task engine with state, recovery and highly scalable. It's cool stuff, and it simplifies many business workflows when it comes to recovery and scaling. There are many similar systems on the market today that mimic durable functions but Temporal is arguably the best.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#26

Post by gvdongen »

pksunkara wrote: post #4

Can someone tell me why people prefer temporal over something like https://restate.dev ?

Hi! I work for Restate

A few key differences. Restate has a more flexible programming model. You don't write workflows with activitities, but just durable processes/handlers. Durable steps execute inline and get persisted over an open streaming connection in Restate (low latency, lower overhead per durable step, sharing resources like sandboxes) instead of working with a pull-model where each activity executes remotely on a worker. Restate has a lean deployment model with a single binary that can be deployed multiple times to have a highly-available cluster (potentially spread across multiple regions). It is used for large-scale production clusters, and so lightweight here does not mean less reliable than Temporal.

You can do the same things with Temporal like sleep for months etc. You can learn more here: https://restate.dev/vs/temporal

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#27

Post by a_c »

a_c wrote: post #9

Can someone shed some lights on what temporal does? Their blog says [1] Durable Execution offers three key benefits: It improves application reliability by providing fault tolerance. It simplifies code by allowing it to focus on the goal instead of potential problems. It accelerates development by eliminating the need to write complex error-handling logic. So... like exception handling? or something like erlang's let…

Thank you for all the explanations. I think I have better understanding now. Another question, at what scale (in terms of number of services, and maybe throughput? what other dimensions?) should we start considering using temporal?

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#29

Post by bilalq »

pksunkara wrote: post #4

Can someone tell me why people prefer temporal over something like https://restate.dev ?

The responses to this thread seem to be from people who are familiar with Temporal but haven't ever actually used Restate. They're both durable execution platforms, with differences mostly around how abstractions are organized and how orchestration of work happens (Temporal has you setup worker pools that pull from a queue while Restate pushes to service handlers). If some of your infra runs on serverless providers, Restate will often be a more natural fit.

Sure, Temporal is more mature and battle-tested, but Restate is quite nice and I honestly prefer it in most cases.

EDIT:

I started drafting this reply before seeing someone from the Restate team chimed in.

Re: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation

#30

Post by skrtskrt »

gvdongen wrote: post #26
pksunkara wrote: post #4

Can someone tell me why people prefer temporal over something like https://restate.dev ?

Hi! I work for Restate A few key differences. Restate has a more flexible programming model. You don't write workflows with activitities, but just durable processes/handlers. Durable steps execute inline and get persisted over an open streaming connection in Restate (low latency, lower overhead per durable step, sharing resources like sandboxes) instead of working with a pull-model where each activity executes remote…

How do “stream over an open connection” and things like “sleep for months” play together?

Naively without digging into the code I would look at a “streaming over an open connection” as likely to strictly more brittle.

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