How to build a resilient platform control plane with Temporal

The text explores the development of platform control planes using Temporal, focusing on transitioning from basic infrastructure workflows to the Entity Workflow pattern, which involves one long-running workflow per managed resource. It highlights how Temporal handles complex infrastructure operations by making steps durable, observable, and recoverable, contrasting this with traditional shell scripts that lack retries, logging, and rollback capabilities. The Entity Workflow pattern is detailed as a long-running execution that maps one-to-one with a specific resource, enabling efficient management of resource lifecycles, command execution, error handling, and state tracking. The discussion emphasizes the importance of using Temporal's features like Continue-as-New to manage long-lived workflows, ensuring idempotency, and designing for durability and scalability from the outset. Additionally, it provides guidance on interacting with Entity Workflows through Temporal Client and the significance of architectural decisions in workflow design, such as when to use Activities, methods, or Child Workflows, and how to handle errors and compensations effectively. The text concludes by encouraging the integration of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Pulumi with Temporal for enhanced orchestration capabilities.