Track customer loyalty points with durable workflows

The guide explores the complexities and solutions of managing loyalty programs at scale, emphasizing the use of Temporal's Entity Workflow pattern to ensure a durable and responsive system for each customer. By providing a dedicated, persistent workflow for each customer, the system ensures real-time processing of point accruals, tier upgrades, and redemptions, eliminating the need for shared databases and cron jobs. The workflow maintains state in-memory, processes external signals, updates, and queries, and can run continuously throughout the customer's lifetime with mechanisms like Continue-As-New to manage history size. Temporal's features, including durable timers, message passing, and deterministic replay, support the architecture, offering a scalable and reliable solution that isolates failures and maintains consistency across interactions. The guide also covers operational considerations, such as event history limits and payload size constraints, and provides a detailed implementation plan that includes defining data models, implementing activities, configuring workers, and managing workflow evolution with Temporal's Worker Versioning feature.