August 2021 Summaries

Temporal is a workflow engine that provides transactional and reliability guarantees around microservice orchestration. It can be used for both short-term and long-term use cases, ranging from file update operations to background checks coordination. The key advantage of Temporal lies in its ability to handle uncertainty in distributed systems by persisting event histories as a source of truth, making state easy to store and fully auditable. This allows developers to model every user as a long-lived entity in their system, enabling them to coordinate actions like loyalty rewards, subscription charges, and reminder emails over the entire history of their relationship with customers.

Temporal is a workflow engine that helps build and operate resilient systems by preserving the state of computations and execution. It enables developers to focus on business logic rather than managing complex distributed system architectures. The platform offers a cloud-hosted version of its open-source solution, with a permissive MIT license. Temporal's adoption has grown organically through bottom-up adoption by engineers within companies like HashiCorp, Coinbase, and DoorDash. Its founders emphasize the importance of making software open source to ensure longevity and continuous improvement.