Bridging Pub/Sub to Temporal with Standalone Activities

Houman Kargaran, an Engineering Lead at ANZ Bank, discusses the complexities of processing Pub/Sub messages before the advent of Temporal's Standalone Activities, highlighting the challenges faced by engineers in managing retries, state tracking, and visibility when processing messages from a queue. Standalone Activities, now in Public Preview, offer a streamlined approach by allowing a single activity to run independently, acting as a durable bridge between Pub/Sub and Temporal, thus simplifying event handling by ensuring that each file ingestion remains visible and traceable. This method reduces overhead by eliminating the need for a full Workflow and is particularly useful for executing single functions with built-in retries and timeouts, such as sending emails or processing webhooks, while keeping the event handler decoupled from the processing logic. The article emphasizes the benefits of Standalone Activities in maintaining a thin event handler and suggests that further exploration into the first Activity within the Workflow will be covered in a subsequent article.

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