October 2023 Summaries

Replay, a software company, recently hosted an event where they showcased several product updates and announcements. The keynote was presented by Samar, CTO and co-founder, and Preeti, SVP of Engineering, and covered various features including native Temporal monitoring in Datadog, Temporal updates such as versioning, schedules, workflow update, multi-region cloud, and more. These updates aim to improve development friction, reduce latencies, provide granular controls for scheduling workflows, automate worker versioning, simplify user management, and enable global namespaces for high availability. The demos were successful, and the new features are now available for use.

Temporal’s open source platform for durable execution is getting new features such as schedules and workflow updates, which simplify backend services implementation and lower latency. Temporal Cloud is a stateful serverless service where customers only pay for what their application uses, with principles of transparency, control, and avoiding sub-optimal decisions to manage costs. The new additions require an update to Temporal Cloud's metering, changing how it counts usage of schedules, workflow updates, child workflows, and local activities, which will result in a net-neutral cost impact across hundreds of services and applications, with most applications being completely unaffected and those affected seeing only minor changes in action count.

The newsletter from Temporal, dated October 27th, highlights a range of updates and events related to Temporal Cloud and community activities. It announces the availability of Replay 2023 talks for viewing, outlines several features in pre-GA preview, such as Global Namespace for increased availability and Workflow History Export, and discusses enhancements to the Temporal Cloud CLI. The newsletter also covers updates to the Go SDK and Temporal CLI, including an integration with the slog package and a new Timeline view feature. Additionally, it previews upcoming changes to Temporal Cloud's metering and mentions various events sponsored by Temporal, such as Denver Dev Day, Pycon Sweden, and JS Conf Colombia, where Temporal team members will be presenting. The newsletter encourages community engagement through meetups and offers resources like a free course on Temporal Cloud and articles on worker tuning and visualization updates in the UI.

At Replay 2023, Max, CEO and co-founder of Temporal, discussed the future of event-driven architectures with a focus on Durable Execution. He argued that while event-driven architecture is beneficial for scalability and resilience in backend development, it often results in a poor developer experience. Temporal and Durable Execution simplify this by encapsulating complexities, allowing developers to concentrate on business logic. Max also explored how Temporal can be integrated into existing architectures and where Durable Execution may be advantageous or not for specific applications. His talk is available on the Replay Rewind site along with other talks from the event.

This guide provides an introduction to worker tuning in Temporal, focusing on the deployment patterns and configurations that impact Worker performance. It assumes familiarity with Temporal concepts and provides a starting point for deploying and managing your own Worker Pool. The guide covers key terms such as Workers, Task Queues, Tasks, Commands, Events, and how they work together to make progress on Workflows and Activities. It also discusses the metrics and configuration values that can help determine when more or fewer Workers are needed, emphasizing the importance of striking a balance between capacity planning and resource efficiency.

Last month, the second annual conference was held in Bellevue, Washington, with over 450 attendees and speakers from prominent companies like Netflix, Datadog, Maersk, Grab, Logixboard, Autokitteh, Yum! Brands, Twilio, Hashicorp, Retool, AWS, and Microsoft. The first set of talks has been published on the Replay Rewind site for viewers to watch and share with others. Expect more talks to be posted in the coming weeks. Key topics covered include Temporal CEO Maxim Fateev's keynote address, Temporal Cloud custom persistence layer, product updates like versioning, schedules, workflow update, multi-region cloud, and durable execution best practices.

Temporal is a game-changing technology that simplifies the development of distributed applications. It provides durable execution, ensuring strong reliability guarantees for business logic and reducing the need for sprawling microservices. The author argues that Temporal represents the next step in computing machines' natural progression, transforming the cloud into a new kind of machine beyond physical or virtual ones: a distributed machine. This is achieved by abstracting distributed processing away from applications, enabling them to run across multiple machines as if they were a single higher-level distributed machine. Temporal provides a solution that lets developers just run their program across arbitrarily many machines, picking up from exactly the same line of code where the former machine stopped making progress.

This is a monthly newsletter from Temporal, detailing their recent activities and upcoming events, including their second-annual Replay conference in Seattle where they met users and discussed new technologies. Temporal also announced several product updates to their Temporal platform, including a new update to their PHP SDK with support for React/Promises v3, Eager Workflow Dispatch, and more. The company is now offering free access to Temporal Cloud for startups with less than $30M in funding. Upcoming events include QCon in San Francisco, All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a London meetup series. Temporal will also be sharing recorded talks from the Replay 2023 conference.

The Frontend team at Temporal has introduced the Timeline view, which simplifies the visualization of Workflows in their UI. This feature represents the flow of Events over time and uses Event Groups to showcase related events. Users can navigate and filter the Timeline by scrolling vertically or horizontally, zooming in or out, and using an Event Type filter. The Timeline is built with the vis-timeline library and offers several future improvements such as fullscreen support, multi-select Event Type filtering, and additional information in tooltips. Feedback from users is encouraged to help improve the feature.

Temporal Cloud has introduced a free online Introduction to Temporal Cloud course, designed for both new and existing users. The self-paced course covers key features of the service, including navigating the Web UI, creating namespaces, performing user management tasks, defining endpoints, and viewing usage information. While basic knowledge of the Temporal Platform is recommended, no prior experience with Temporal Cloud is required. Interested users can access the course today.