April 2021 Summaries

The Temporal team is working on new SDKs that will support multiple languages, with a focus on clean integration, good ergonomics for users, high performance, and maintainability. They aim to build a shared core library that can be used by language-specific SDKs, which will provide a stable basis for new language SDKs and increase the maintainability of existing ones. The team has chosen Rust as the language for the Core SDK due to its "fearless concurrency", performance and safety, quality type system, and ease of connecting multiple languages to a shared library. The goal is to support a larger selection of languages in the future, with the first alpha release of the Node.js SDK expected soon, followed by a port of the existing Go SDK.

The talk discusses the requirements for a workflow engine, including task queues, timers, consistency, scalability, sharding and routing, system workflows, and external workflow and activity implementations. It introduces Temporal, an open-source implementation of these concepts, which aims to provide a simple, scalable, and consistent workflow engine. The talk covers the history of Temporal, its programming model, and how it solves common problems such as consistency, scalability, and sharding. It also discusses the importance of transactions, the transactional "Outbox" pattern, and the use of indexing components like Elasticsearch for workflow visibility. Additionally, the talk touches on system workflows, Temporal's architecture, multi-cluster deployment, and high availability. The presentation concludes that Temporal provides a highly scalable and consistent workflow engine with flexibility, making it an attractive option for developers.

This is a summary of Temporal's decision to end support for Cadence: Temporal has grown into its own entity, diverging from its original roots in Cadence, and now it's time to prioritize its own reliability and focus on improving developer experiences. The company will no longer provide free support for Cadence after September 29th, 2021, but users can still migrate to Temporal with the help of the community and support team.