Snakes, chaos, and the resilience of Temporal: A live demo breakdown

A live demo at the Temporal Keynote showcased Temporal's resilience and orchestration capabilities through a multiplayer snake game, highlighting its ability to handle unpredictability in distributed systems. The game involved players controlling snakes in real-time, with each snake, game round, and move orchestrated as independent workflows by Temporal. The game utilized a Svelte application and Socket.io for low-latency communication, while Temporal Cloud and tablets powered the game workers. The demo included planned disruptions, such as worker restarts and network failures, to test Temporal's recovery capabilities, which it handled seamlessly, demonstrating its durable execution model. Key lessons learned included Temporal's reliability, the effective integration of Socket.io for the user interface, limitations of using tablets for game workers, and the superior performance of the Go SDK over Typescript for worker processes. The demo underscored Temporal's robustness in challenging scenarios, encouraging its adoption for orchestrating complex workflows beyond gaming applications.