Orchestration powered by Temporal at Zscaler: Wrap, don’t rewrite

Zscaler architects Kartick Krishnachetty Ravi and Abhishek Mitra describe building an automation platform that uses Temporal Workflows as a durable orchestration layer above a heterogeneous set of existing tools, including Ansible, Terraform and OpenTofu, Helm, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Kubernetes Cluster API, CloudFormation, and Jenkins. Rather than replacing or refactoring these brownfield systems, the approach wraps each engine as a leaf-level activity within composite workflows, allowing cross-engine operations to be sequenced, monitored, retried, and recovered through a persistent workflow contract. The authors argue that this reduces reliance on fragile scripts and chained pipelines while preserving direct access to original tools for break-glass situations and enabling incremental adoption. Temporal Workers also support distributed execution through outbound, “inside-out” connections from the environments where tools run, which can simplify operation across secured networks. The same architecture could later incorporate AI agents and LLM-based tasks as additional workflow activities alongside deterministic infrastructure automation.

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