What does "Long Running" really mean?

Temporal is a workflow engine that provides transactional and reliability guarantees around microservice orchestration. It can be used for both short-term and long-term use cases, ranging from file update operations to background checks coordination. The key advantage of Temporal lies in its ability to handle uncertainty in distributed systems by persisting event histories as a source of truth, making state easy to store and fully auditable. This allows developers to model every user as a long-lived entity in their system, enabling them to coordinate actions like loyalty rewards, subscription charges, and reminder emails over the entire history of their relationship with customers.