Task Queue Priority and Fairness: Your Task Queue, your way

Temporal's Task Queue Priority and Fairness features have been introduced to address challenges faced by users as they scale, particularly issues related to execution control within a single Task Queue. These features allow users to assign priority levels to tasks, ensuring that critical ones are processed first, and implement fairness to prevent any single workflow, user, or tenant from monopolizing resources. By using these features together, users can create efficient and equitable task execution strategies without needing custom infrastructure. This is particularly beneficial for multi-tenant systems where one customer's high-volume workload could otherwise delay others. The Priority feature assigns integer values from 1 to 5, determining the execution order, while Fairness distributes tasks proportionally across tenants using a weighted round-robin algorithm. Both features are available for self-hosted and Temporal Cloud users, with specific configuration options and potential charges for Fairness in the cloud. These innovations are aimed at enhancing multi-tenant control, with the promise of further developments in the future.