March 2023 Summaries

The text discusses the development journey of Temporal, a technology that was initially intimidating and unapproachable for new users due to its packaging and distribution. The idea of a single binary was introduced as a solution to this problem, but it faced challenges in terms of dependencies like persistence and visibility store. Datadog's team independently developed a similar solution called Temporalite, which inspired Temporal to think more fundamentally about the idea itself. This led to the development of Temporal CLI, a unified tool that supports all core Temporal functionality and can be easily installed from package managers like brew. The text also mentions future plans for Temporal CLI, such as guided onboarding experience and support for Advanced Visibility with SQLite.

The newsletter from Temporal, dated March 29, announces a series of updates and events, including the release of Temporal v1.20, which introduces new features such as the Temporal CLI for local development without containers and enhanced scheduling controls with Scheduled Actions. Additional server updates include improved visibility on SQL, an archival overhaul, and cross-shard replication capabilities. The newsletter also highlights recent SDK enhancements, including .NET, Java, Go, and Python support, alongside community engagement opportunities through upcoming events and educational resources. Readers are encouraged to participate in the community via meetups, webinars, and submitting proposals for Replay 2023, and are informed about the company's latest funding round.

Temporal 1.20 introduces several capabilities that extend distributed systems best practices to simplify Temporal development environments and gain more control over scheduling Workflows, enabling developers to set up and run development environments faster with the new Temporal CLI, which supports convenient installation with curl or Homebrew, replacing the previous containerized setup. The release also extends the Temporal CLI with Advanced Visibility for querying Workflow Executions and introduces Scheduled Workflows, providing tools necessary to gain visibility into Schedules and Workflow runs, create independent Schedules, edit Schedule specifications, give Schedules a state of Paused or Running, limit runs, backfill runs, and configure policies. Additionally, 1.20 includes support for Schedules in the CLI and Web UI, experimental APIs for Go, TypeScript, and Python SDKs, and other features such as archival feature reimplemented using a separate task queue, replication between clusters with different shard counts, BatchOperation to support DeleteWorkflow, OpenTelemetry upgraded to 0.34, security-related changes to the Default authorizer, internal frontend deployment option, and deprecation heads-up for older MySQL and Postgres versions.

In part 2 of the series "Building Reliable Distributed Systems in Node.js", we explore how Temporal can provide durable execution. A function that is fail-safe, long-lasting and doesn't require database storage? It sounds like magic but it's just JavaScript running on any server capable of running Node.js. The process involves three parts: the Client, Server, and Worker. The Client initiates commands such as "start the order() durable function", "send a delivered Signal" or "terminate the function". The Worker is a long-running Node.js process that contains our code and polls the Server for tasks. Tasks look like "run the order() durable function" or "run the normal sendPushNotification() function". After the Worker runs the code, it reports the result back to the Server. In production, web apps and their serverless functions are deployed to Vercel, the long-running Worker process is deployed to Render, and they both talk to a Server instance hosted by Temporal Cloud. In development, we can run all three parts locally using the Temporal CLI. The Event History is the core of what enables durable execution: a log of everything important that the Workflow does and gets sent. It allows us to Ctrl-C our Worker process, start it again, open up the UI, select our completed order Workflow, go to the Queries tab of the UI, and send the getStatus Query. We examined how durable code works under the hood: we can write functions that can't fail to complete executing (since when the Worker process dies, the next Worker to pick up the task will get the function's Event History and use the events to re-run the code until it's in the same state). We can also retry the functions that might have transient failures.

Temporal has released an online, self-paced course called "Temporal 101 in TypeScript." The course is designed for developers new to Temporal and covers fundamental concepts using the Temporal TypeScript SDK. It does not assume knowledge of TypeScript, making it accessible to JavaScript developers as well. The course includes written content, videos, assessments, and hands-on exercises, with an estimated completion time of two hours. A certificate of completion is provided upon finishing the course. No software downloads are required, as a browser-based exercise environment is provided through GitPod. Developers who have already taken "Temporal 101 in Go" may still benefit from taking this TypeScript course to strengthen their understanding of core components and learn more about the specific features of the Temporal TypeScript SDK.

Temporal Python SDK is now fully supported for writing durable workflows in Python. The SDK leverages native asyncio constructs and is open source under the MIT license. It allows developers to write deterministic workflow code that can be replayed with events on different workers, making it a perfect fit for Python developers looking to create robust workflows. Temporal Python also supports multiple activity styles, workflow sandboxing, and has two test server implementations for easy testing. The SDK is backed by the same Rust core as other Temporal SDKs, ensuring compatibility and performance improvements across all supported languages.

The text discusses the author's experience with learning and implementing Temporal, a platform for building robust applications, using Python SDK. They built a poker game to understand how Temporal works in practice. The author emphasizes on keeping the new technology as streamlined as possible while learning it, by using supplemental technologies that they are comfortable with. They also share their experience of using PyCharm IDE for this project and encourage others to ask questions and seek help on the forum.

The text discusses the implementation of workflows and workers using Python SDK for Temporal, an open-source, cloud-native microservices orchestration platform. It provides a detailed breakdown of the code structure in two files - workflow.py and worker.py. The workflow.py file contains the definition of a workflow class that calls activities, while the worker.py file sets up a worker to execute tasks on the queue. The text also explains how to connect to Temporal Server using Client and run the workflow using execute_workflow method. It concludes with an example of taking input from the console and passing it to the workflow for processing.

Temporal has released a new Python SDK that makes it easier to enable durable execution in Python applications. The SDK was initially community-driven, but is now fully featured and officially supported by Temporal. It allows for the creation of durable execution systems that persist each step taken by code, ensuring that if the process or container running the code dies, the code will continue running in another process with all state intact. The SDK can be installed using the Temporal CLI or Python's temporalio package. A basic usage example is provided in the samples repo: hello_activity.py. Temporal also offers a variety of sample applications and resources to help users learn more about its capabilities.

Temporal sponsored and attended the 2023 PHP UK Conference in London, which brought together hundreds of leading developers for workshops, talks, networking, and socials. The conference featured numerous insightful discussions on topics such as mission-critical software development, geographies of software development, and new technologies. Temporal also hosted a London-based community meetup during the event. Upcoming events include in-person and virtual Temporal Community Meetups, QCon London, DevOxx France, and PyCon US.

Replay Conference is back for its second annual event on September 12-14th in Seattle. The conference will feature more workshops, multiple tracks, and a full day of content. Submissions are open until May 20th for talks about platforms, technologies, innovative use cases, architectural renewal, developer experience, platform engineering, and complexity management. New speakers are encouraged to apply with the support of a dedicated program. The conference aims to be a source of innovation and community building in the field of backend engineering.