October 2020 Summaries

Two college students working on their last Computer Science project for the semester face challenges when implementing a distributed algorithm to solve a large problem by breaking it down into sub-problems. They encounter issues such as determining which machine is responsible for coordinating with others, how to handle machine failures or reboots, and ensuring balanced workload distribution among worker machines. The students end up taking shortcuts in their solution due to time constraints. Years later, one of the students realizes that Temporal, a platform they would have benefited from during their project, deserves attention in undergraduate Distributed Systems courses.

The author, Plushcap, joined the AWS Simple Workflow (SWF) team in 2010, where they worked on delivering 10X productivity to developers and iterating with them to solve real problems. After shipping the public SWF service, Plushcap took an opportunity at Microsoft Azure and joined the Azure Service Bus team, which led to the creation of Durable Task Framework (DTFx) as an OSS client SDK using Azure ServiceBus as the backend. Later, Plushcap joined Uber's engineering team in 2015, where they observed similar problems with Kafka and created the OSS project Cherami, but eventually pivoted to create Cadence, a multi-tenant service hosted by their team that provided a great developer experience for building stateful applications. The success of these projects led to the creation of Temporal Technologies, an Open Source Software under MIT license, which was launched in October 2019 and is already being used by numerous companies for critical workloads.

Temporal, an open-source project that has been iterated and refined over the past decade, announces a successful funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Amplify Partners. The funds will be used to enhance open-source features, fixes, community growth, and develop Temporal Cloud. Additionally, Temporal is working on case studies with Box, Checkr, and Coinbase, showcasing the benefits of using Temporal in their operations. Lastly, Temporal is hiring talented individuals for various roles within the company.

The author left Microsoft after a successful career to join Temporal Technologies, an open-source workflow engine company founded by Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas. The decision was driven by the realization that RPC (remote procedure call) and workflows are complementary aspects of interactive applications, and combining them could greatly reduce complexity in application code. Temporal Technologies' programming model aligns with this vision, aiming to make applications resilient to failures and empower developers to focus on interesting problems. The author was attracted by the company's innovative solutions and the founders' shared passion for reducing complexity in application development.