February 2022 Summaries

The text discusses using Temporal's long-lived Workflows to build REST APIs without a conventional database, and introduces temporal-rest, a package that simplifies creating RESTful APIs for these Workflows. It demonstrates how to use temporal-rest with ExpressJS to create an API for counterWorkflow, a sample long-lived Workflow. The API supports POST, GET, and PUT requests for starting new instances of the Workflow, executing Queries on existing instances, and sending Signals to them, respectively. It also explains how to pass parameters to these operations using JSON request bodies or query strings.

Temporal has announced its Series B fundraising with a letter from Maxim, an announcement from Bryan Offutt at Index Ventures, a teaser video, and community Q&A. The company has received positive press coverage from Geekwire, The Register, Silicon Angle, Daily UK, Computer Weekly, and CIO Review. Temporal's technology is a microservice orchestration platform that enables developers to build scalable applications without sacrificing productivity or reliability. It is already in use by companies such as Netflix, Snap, Box, Hashicorp, Coinbase, and others. The new cash infusion will be used primarily for research and development of the open-source platform, additional language support, educational resources, and expansion of the developer advocate network. Temporal provides a uniform and unified backend for stateful applications, allowing developers to utilize their preferred languages, tool stacks, and deployment environment.

Temporal Technologies has secured $103 million in funding led by Index Ventures, with major investors Sequoia, Amplify, Addition, and Madrona also participating. This brings the company's valuation to $1.5 billion. The platform was designed as a highly scalable multi-tenant service from its inception and has been battle-tested at Uber through various use cases. Temporal is an open-source project under a permissive MIT license, with monetization plans focused on providing a hosted offering (Temporal Cloud). The company aims to make reliability easy and affordable for applications of all sizes, educate developers about its value proposition, and foster a vibrant ecosystem of technologies built around Temporal.

Temporal is a new kind of platform that upends traditional ways of building and operating distributed applications in cloud infrastructure. It transparently manages state at any scope and scale, outsourcing cross-cutting concerns and making applications more reliable, productive, and easier to operate. By commoditizing reliability as a fundamental aspect of software development, Temporal aims to democratize access to this critical capability, giving engineers the freedom to take risks and build more automated and productive systems. The platform is built on open source principles and distributed systems, with a singular vision to make it responsive to the community, informative to prospects, and accountable to customers.