November 2023 Summaries

Temporal Cloud for Startups offers free credits and support to help small businesses develop their projects faster and more reliably. By abstracting away state management and automating its handling, Temporal allows developers to focus on building business logic rather than engineering for it, resulting in 2-10x faster development velocity. This enables startups to reach product-market fit faster, win the trust of early customers with good reliability, build distributed systems without requiring specialized expertise, set up systems for scale without sacrificing agility, and access advice from experienced engineers on how to optimize their systems.

In the Temporal community, a user asked if it is possible to create event-based Workflows and how Activities within a Workflow can wait for these events. The answer is yes; Temporal allows creating async Activities within Workflow Definitions using its event loop in Python. By setting up signal handlers and using the `wait_condition` function, it's possible to create an event-based flow where each Activity requires waiting on a specific event or condition before proceeding to the next Activity. This approach ensures that the Workflow can wait for weeks between events, recover from worker crashes, and continue executing Activities as needed.

In a recent webinar, Jon Morehouse and Jordan Acosta from Nuon discussed how they rebuilt their API using Temporal, an open-source workflow engine. Nuon is an infrastructure company that enables software companies to create a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) version of their app. The team initially faced challenges with their external-facing API, which was slow and buggy. They decided to explore rebuilding the API with Temporal and found significant improvements in developer velocity, reliability, and insights within just one developer month. Temporal's event loop model simplifies programming by handling side effects and workflows asynchronously, allowing for a lightweight and scalable architecture.

Temporal Schedules` is a replacement for traditional `Cron jobs` that provides more durable task scheduling, insight into progress, and observability of schedules and workflow runs. It offers enhanced control and observability over workflows, flexible and extensible scheduling, and eliminates the need for external dependencies. The new feature streamlines time-based workflow management, simplifies the process, and reduces complexity. It is designed to be more powerful than traditional `Cron` jobs and provides a clear view of schedules and runs with operations such as start, backfill, pause, and update workflows seamlessly. The feature is available in open-source and has been added to the CLI, Web UI, Go SDK, TypeScript SDK, Java SDK, .NET SDK, and Python SDK.

Temporal 102: Exploring Durable Execution with TypeScript is now generally available and focuses on best practices and key concepts for deploying a Temporal application to production. This self-paced, online course is free and builds upon the foundation laid by Temporal 101. The TypeScript version of Temporal 102 has been improved based on feedback from live courses in Go, Java, and TypeScript. A Python SDK version of this course will be released before the end of 2023, with a separate course on Versioning also planned for release by the end of 2023.

Temporal is launching its Partner Ecosystem to promote Durable Execution as a mainstream reality for customers and community members. The ecosystem aims to help engineering teams move faster, do more with Temporal, and shorten the time it takes to get from where they are today to where they want to be with Durable Execution and Temporal. Curated partners will deliver services such as modernizing existing applications, migrating applications, and building new features or applications with Temporal. The first cohort of partners includes companies from various geographies that share a developer-first philosophy and strong subject matter expertise.

Temporal 102: Exploring Durable Execution with Java is a new self-paced online training course that focuses on best practices and key concepts for deploying Temporal applications to production. Unlike Temporal 101, which covers the basics of building and running a basic Temporal application, this course emphasizes testing, debugging, and deployment strategies. The Java version of Temporal 102 is slightly different from its Go counterpart, with some content reorganized or removed. Future versions in TypeScript and Python are expected by the end of 2023. A separate course on Versioning will be released soon.

Temporal Cloud has released several features as part of its pre-GA preview, including Global Namespace for multi-region Namespace replication, credit burn down management, and workflow history export. The company also announced updates to its SDKs, including a new integration with the slog package in the Go SDK, and experimental Timeline view in the Temporal CLI. Additionally, Temporal Cloud is hosting several upcoming events, including meetups and conferences, and has released a new free course on Introduction to Temporal Cloud. The community can also access resources such as performance tuning guides and UI updates for visualizing workflows.