April 2024 Summaries

Four new hands-on training courses have been released for securing application data using specific SDKs: Go, Java, Python, and TypeScript. The courses cover customizing data conversion behavior, understanding best practices for codecs and encryption, and creating and deploying a Codec Server. These courses are suitable for Temporal application developers who understand how to retrieve Workflow output and navigate the Web UI.

Eager Workflow Start (EWS) is an experimental latency optimization aimed at reducing the time it takes to start a workflow. It includes the initial workflow task when there is a local worker ready to process it, targeting short-lived workflows that interact with other services using local activities. Applications include financial transactions, collaborative apps, and remote interactions with physical devices. EWS can significantly lower latency by enabling interaction between starter and worker while bypassing the server, saving time-intensive operations. However, it requires sharing a client connection between the worker and the starter, limiting them to run in the same process and share a common lifecycle.

The Temporal Web UI offers a view of workflows and history events within a single workflow execution, providing valuable feedback on operational efficiencies and bottlenecks. Workflow History Export in Temporal Cloud allows users to export closed workflow histories to AWS S3 for further analysis. By transforming the data from proto format to Parquet, it becomes more suitable for analysis and can be fed into various datastores like Amazon S3, Athena, Redshift, Snowflake or Databricks. Sample queries are provided for insights such as frequently triggered workflow types, activity types, average execution times of top workflow types, and longest running activities. Limitations include the need to dedupe data based on runID, exclusion of payload field, and variability in schema over time. Future enhancements may include support for more data types and improvements to customer experience.

Temporal's UI has been improved to provide a better user experience when working with Workflows. The Compact view represents a linear progression of Event Groups, while the Timeline view shows clock-time durations and positions of lines and dots updated in real-time for running Workflows. The Full History view is for low-level details, including Workflow Tasks. Filters and Tabs have been added to improve organization. Dark Mode has also been implemented for easier eye strain management during late-night debugging sessions. Child Workflows can now be hidden in the Workflow List, with a toggle option available.

AI and ML developers often face challenges in system orchestration such as managing complex data pipelines, job coordination across GPU resources, failure handling, and deploying models. Temporal provides a code-first approach to tackle these orchestration challenges head-on, allowing developers to build more reliable services faster. Many AI companies use Temporal for orchestrating end-to-end AI/ML processes and managing complex data pipelines. Its Workflow and Activity model is designed specifically for developers dealing with complex orchestration tasks, providing visibility, resilience, and flexibility.

The Public Preview of the Temporal Cloud Terraform Provider has been announced, allowing developers to automate the management of their Temporal Cloud infrastructure using Terraform, an open-source tool created by HashiCorp. This provider supports Namespace and User resources, with plans to expand support for more resources in future updates. The Public Preview release also includes use cases such as Namespace Creation | Update | Delete, User Creation | Update | Delete, and managing User Account-level roles and Namespace-level permissions. Getting started involves setting up a Temporal Cloud account, a Terraform environment, and an API Key. The Temporal Cloud Terraform provider documentation provides detailed guides for managing Temporal Cloud resources with Terraform. Feedback during this Public Preview is crucial as the team plans to support more resources and enhance the provider's capabilities.

Temporal Cloud offers improved scalability, availability, latency, and cost-effectiveness compared to self-hosted Temporal. Migration from self-hosted Temporal to Temporal Cloud involves routing new executions to the Temporal Cloud namespace while resuming existing ones in that namespace. Currently, migrations occur at the application level rather than the database level. Key tasks for migration include introducing a new Temporal Client, deciding on data encryption strategy, choosing the lifetime strategy of Workflow Executions, updating code calling Workflows, and creating a test and verification plan. The process may take a day or so depending on the complexity of Workflows. Our team will guide you through every step of your migration for no extra fee.

Temporal Cloud has reached over 1,000 customers within a year and half of its launch, serving companies across various industries worldwide. The platform is based on the Durable Execution vision by Samar and offers an open-source project under the MIT license. Temporal Cloud's key innovations include a control plane for efficient scaling and custom persistence for improved performance. With over 15 billion actions managed daily, Temporal Cloud aims to simplify deployment, management, and scaling while offering fair consumption-based pricing.

Temporal Schedules offer a reliable and efficient alternative to traditional scheduling systems like Cron jobs, systemd timers, and Celery. They allow developers to execute workflows at specific times or intervals, providing enhanced control and observability over task management operations such as starting, pausing, resuming, backfilling, deleting, describing, listing, triggering, and updating scheduled workflow executions. Temporal Schedules simplify workflow management by treating tasks as independent entities with detailed specifications for each schedule. The integration of Temporal Schedules with existing non-Temporal scripts can be achieved by wrapping the current code in an Activity within a single-activity Workflow, allowing for a straightforward transition to using Temporal as a Cron replacement without extensive code rewrites.

The blog post announces the release of Replay tickets, CFPs, and upcoming workshops. It also highlights new technology features such as Server version 1.23.0, Temporal's Terraform provider, and Workflow History Export in Public Preview. SDK updates for PHP, Go, and Java are mentioned along with the release of automation features in Temporal Cloud. Upcoming events include QCon London, DevNexus, and Great International Developer Summit. The post also promotes an on-demand webinar series and provides resources for understanding versioning in Temporal applications. Community favorites are highlighted, including FireHydrant's testing of Temporal Signals and the benefits of Temporal Cloud for disaster recovery and custom persistence layers.

This article discusses the cost considerations for self-hosting Temporal and using Temporal Cloud. For self-hosting, costs include compute infrastructure, a sophisticated tech stack, hardware, and operational resources. In contrast, Temporal Cloud's pricing is consumption-based, covering actions, storage, and support fees. The article provides cost estimation strategies for both scenarios and emphasizes the benefits of Temporal Cloud's flexible pricing model compared to upfront investments required for self-hosting.