September 2020 Summaries

Temporal has officially released version 1.0.0, marking a significant milestone for the project and its community. This release signifies that the system is now stable with no more breaking API or schema changes for publicly facing APIs. However, some features are considered experimental and not deemed "production ready." The Temporal team plans to continue improving the product while engaging more with users through meetups, conferences, and design sessions. They also plan to release a cloud offering to make it easier for new users to adopt Temporal.

The latest release of Temporal is V0.30.0 and the team has been focusing on stabilization efforts, with positive results. All tests required for V1 are now running in the pipeline, and some parts of the system have already been stabilized. A few issues have been identified and fixed, and the focus will continue to be on running tests and identifying any remaining issues. Some features will be considered experimental for the V1 release, including archival, cross data center replication, batch operations, dynamic config, and Elasticsearch searchable attributes. The team is confident in their internal timeline for stabilization and expects a stable release in the near future.

The Temporal project, a cloud-native workflow management system, has conducted extensive stress testing to validate its ability to sustain performance under high loads. The "rabbit" scenario generates an exponential burst of load across the entire cluster, while the "reactor" scenario exercises a wide-variety of Temporal features that are commonly used in the field. Stress tests have been run using both the Go and Java SDKs, with the goal of hardening the Java SDK and further proving the stability of the Temporal product. The tests validate various aspects of Temporal's functionality, including workflow execution, signal processing, and worker behavior, and help identify issues such as workflow history corruption and simultaneous SignalWithStarts for the same Workflow ID. Ongoing work includes failure testing and porting stress tests to the Java SDK.

The Temporal team has made significant progress in stabilization efforts since reaching code completion for JavaSDK and shifting focus from development to testing. They have improved deployment infrastructure, nearly completed scale testing scenarios implementation, and begun initial work on fault-injection testing. The number of new bugs discovered is consistently decreasing, indicating positive stabilization success. A blog post will be published covering the specific tests/scenarios in detail.