31 ms·

Temporal raises $103M in Series B funding

92 points by roopakv 5y ago

yevpats 5y ago
The technology is interesting but honestly I don't recommend it to any early stage startup as it has a very high learning curve, high maintainability, limited visibility and so on. Maybe if you got to a stage that you have a problem that temporal can solve and a separate team that can keep it alive and debug it.
- roopakv 5y ago
  I get where you are coming from. However with their cloud offering you get to forget about some of the not easy parts of Temporal and just build something awesome while benefiting from all that temporal has to offer :)
  - yevpats 5y ago
    I agree it might solve part of the problem but I wouldn't jump into this on day 1 of your startup as because its a framework/platform you will be betting your whole company on this. Im not saying its not good just giving a warning to very early stage startups to try and use something like this when they have a problem and not before.
    - debuggerpk 5y ago
- swyx 5y ago
  for what its worth we do have a super early stage (preseed) startup building on us and they're happy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHifpzMn6kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHifpzMn6kA but yeah I would never say that we're for everyone. depends on your knowledge, needs, usecases!
- jusonchan81 5y ago
  This is true, we tried and abandoned it. Felt like shifting the problem from one place to another
josephg 5y ago
What is temporal, in plain English? I can’t make heads or tails of it from either this letter or from their homepage.
- dustrider 5y ago
  This seems to do a better job of explaining https://docs.temporal.io/docs/temporal-explained/introduction https://docs.temporal.io/docs/temporal-explained/introductio... From my take, an interesting way of dealing with scalable workflows and batch jobs. But I need to read more into it.
- chugh09 5y ago
  This blog does a good job of explaining it in plain english imo: https://docs.temporal.io/blog/charles-zedlewski-why-i-joined-temporal https://docs.temporal.io/blog/charles-zedlewski-why-i-joined... ctrl + F to here "Temporal is a new kind of platform. It’s not a database, cache, queue, or a means to run your code. It’s a runtime for distributed applications that transparently manages their state at any scope and scale. By externalizing state to a generalized platform like Temporal, application teams get to outsource the majority of cross-cutting concerns presented by cloud applications. In doing so, applications become" if you dont want to read the whole thing
- djmagee 5y ago
  Another excellent overview was just published this morning by Bryan Offutt: https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-our-investment-in-temporal/ https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-w...
- rylandgold 5y ago
  Hey, I'm Ryland and I work at Temporal. Temporal provides a unified backend for automatically managing implicit application state that is normally stored in transient queues, databases etc. Furthermore, Temporal does this without explicitly requiring the developer to think about and manage the state themselves. This means developers spend way more time building stuff that actually matters, and less time writing buggy reliability code. I personally find the best way to explain it is with an analogy. Back in the late 90s many developers built applications with C and therefore had to manage their own memory. For a long time, this was not wasted effort as it was the only real option. But then, Java came around and offered an experience where developers didn't have to manage their memory. And for the majority of apps, the performance and capabilities of Java were more than sufficient. At this point, writing the average application in C meant you were doing a serious amount of undifferentiated work. Furthermore, most developers weren't that great at memory management so choosing to do it by hand meant more work for a worse result. The value proposition of Temporal is nearly identical, but instead of manually managing memory with C, developers are manually managing state using queues, CRON services, databases and more. The result is a bunch of time spent doing undifferentiated things that a computer would have done better anyway.
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atarian 5y ago
Was this company launched by Uber or is it just based on Uber's open-source work? EDIT: According to https://blog.amplifypartners.com/our-investment-in-temporal/ https://blog.amplifypartners.com/our-investment-in-temporal/, Temporal was founded by 2 engineers at Uber who created an open-source orchestration engine called Cadence and then later decided to found Temporal.
- swyx 5y ago
  yes correct. open source project started at Uber, project leads left and forked Cadence to start Temporal. origin story on podcast here https://docs.temporal.io/blog/gremlin-podcast#origin-story-of-temporal https://docs.temporal.io/blog/gremlin-podcast#origin-story-o...
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    Shades of Amazon Simple Workflow, which was anything but simple... (: It stands along side SimpleDB as a deprecated AWS service (unofficially), no less. I guess, AWS gave up too soon on Maxim's vision.
    - swyx 5y ago
      i think its more that it took Max ~6 more years after building SWF + getting experience at Google + Uber before he finally got to the right abstraction with Temporal
Thaxll 5y ago
Temporal is such a powerful tool, really don't rollout your own job system using pub/sub, just use Temporal. At first it looks easy to use any pub/sub or DB to create a job system, but there are so many edge cases, I'm not even talking about scaling etc ... just having a solid job system that properly handle retries, error, durability, timeout etc ...
- djmagee 5y ago
  IMO, this is the value of Temporal. You certainly can write your own system—but wouldn't you rather focus on writing code that directly addresses the unique value that you or your company offers?
  - echelon 5y ago
    Build vs buy is hard. Generally you're correct, but then when your tool gets bought out by eg. Splunk (or whomever) and they raise the price 2-5x, you're kind of stuck. Every 3rd party dependency is a complexity you must manage. Every in house system is a complexity you must manage. Nothing is free.
    - mkoubaa 5y ago
      It's free as in puppy
    - swyx 5y ago
      mark my words - temporal will be bigger than Splunk in 5 years. just way bigger TAM.
      - echelon 5y ago
        Best of luck! Love the energy and excitement. :)
      - throwoutway 5y ago
        Splunk’s addressable market is every business right? How is Temporal larger than that? Consumers too?
wmf 5y ago
This headline really makes good news look like bad news.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Yup. I expected a shutdown, a response to widespread harassment allegations, or some sort of open source license change. But it's none of those things, they got funded!
- swyx 5y ago
  title was fixed by dang! fortunately he knows HN better than we do...
swyx 5y ago
This letter is timed with our Series B announcement today! We just did a 1hr livestream here giving context and answering Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40KwlxZJFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40KwlxZJFI Additional coverage for more info: - https://www.geekwire.com/2022/temporal-is-a-unicorn-developer-productivity-startup-lands-120m-at-1-5b-valuation/ https://www.geekwire.com/2022/temporal-is-a-unicorn-develope... - https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/16/temporal_103m_funding/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/16/temporal_103m_funding... - https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/16/temporal-raises-103-million-accelerate-development-stateful-cloud-applications/ https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/16/temporal-raises-103-mill... - https://dailyuknews.com/tech/temporal-raises-103m-in-series-b-funding/ https://dailyuknews.com/tech/temporal-raises-103m-in-series-... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/temporal-io-raises-103-million-170000698.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/temporal-io-raises-103-millio... - https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/Temporal-calls-time-on-cloud-app-state-management https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/Tem... - https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-our-investment-in-temporal/ https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-w...
- ctvo 5y ago
  Love Temporal. Hope you solve the infrastructure and cloud story with this. The biggest pain point is still deploying and configuring a production environment. I started suspecting it was so awful and poorly documented to push us to using the cloud offering, but then I couldn’t even find a link to sign up for cloud.
  - swyx 5y ago
    yup. we are equal opportunity awful! real answer is it's just really hard. even for us, much less the general developer audience. i wrote the docs we do have, and yeah it shows and I'm not proud of it. Temporal's initial demographic was entirely self sufficient in terms of devops knowledge to take the helm charts and docker stuff we have and translate it to their environment, and read source code/talk to us to fill in any gaps. But as we grow then we'll have to provide more and more rails for people who don't do that stuff. tldr we hear you and a big chunk of this money will go toward both better docs and training for both open source and cloud users.
jvican 5y ago
Would really love to see movement on integrating Temporal better with Scala on the JVM, just like it supports Java and Kotlin now. Would love to collaborate or help making this thing happen if you have many things on your plate.
- stock_toaster 5y ago
  Looking at temporal as someone who has used scala with akka, I would also love to see better scala support!
- spikhalskiy 5y ago
  Temporal JavaSDK may get a temporal-scala module the same way it has temporal-kotlin with extension functions and method pointer "disassembling" . Reach out to @Dmitry at temporal support Slack if you want to contribute.
  - jvican 5y ago
    Thanks, I'll reach out soon.
rrix2 5y ago
Congrats to the folks involved. Building a long running (hours to days) workflow pipeline on top of Cadence was some of the most fun I had writing code at Uber. Stellar tooling, stellar team.
- swyx 5y ago
  not too late to join us :)
shuntress 5y ago
So... what actually is it? I've seen the other comments, I've clicked the links and scanned the blog posts. I get that it is a "resilient workflow engine" or whatever. If my SQL & PHP backend serving a basic web API to a React storefront is struggling to handle customer's states (carts, lists, orders, etc) how is this going to help? What are my engineers going to actually do?
- stevekinney 5y ago
  For me, the compelling part was at my last company, we'd build these complicated distributed systems with a whole lot moving pieces—any of which could go down at a moment's notice. For a complex enough system, there was sometimes more work to be done to deal with any part of the system failing than to build the system itself. Basically, we were implementing our own bespoke version of Temporal over and over again. To your point, the complexity of a SQL/PHP application is significantly smaller, but, the value proposition of Temporal is probably still there: If any part of the checkout process fails (e.g. charging the credit card, successfully triggering the order after they've charged the credit card, timing an email if there is an abandoned cart, handling the moving pieces of a return). These pieces are either handled manually by a human or you've got a decent amount of business logic in place to handle each of these edge cases individually. The value-add of Temporal—in this case—would be that it would keep track of where the customer/order was in the overall flow of ordering something and pick up where it left off in the event that something went wrong.
- swyx 5y ago
  hey! so we actually have a React + Temporal example: https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript/tree/main/nextjs-ecommerce-oneclick https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript/tree/main/n... (9 minute demo/talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRYozSljSpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRYozSljSpw) when you are handling your customers' states, every purchase is a long running process, both from an ordering side and a fulfilment perspective. Work needs to be done asynchronously, or you need to wait for some condition to be met to proceed, etc. Temporal makes it so that you don't have to glue together a bunch of schedulers and queues and databases and ad hoc state machines to make that work, make it traceable/debuggable, and make that scale. Your engineers would be able to translate your business requirements directly into workflow code (often just a function) and be able to version control, test, migrate, lint, etc, rather than have that logic spread out over a bunch of your code and infra structure. they would then register it with their Temporal workers, and then invoke/signal those workflows from your php/node/whatever application code. i did a demo recently of what its like to translate product specs to a workflow, like @rrix is saying in another comment, its pretty fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxZgGhT-Xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxZgGhT-Xo
eezurr 5y ago
Im reading the description of this service via the multiple questions asking what Temporal is. So now I am curious, could this be pivoted to work in game development? I understand that is not your target audience, but state management is a necessary part game dev.
- lorendsr 5y ago
  It certainly could, but not a fit for a real-time game. In order to make Temporal general-purpose, fault-tolerant, and scalable, it had to do more database writes / have higher latency than real-time game backends.
daveguy 5y ago
Can someone point me to a simple example use case and why temporal is beneficial? The website has a lot of temporal-specific jargon and not a lot of straightforward examples.
- swyx 5y ago
  How about this case study? https://temporal.io/datadog https://temporal.io/datadog Datadog used Temporal to automate database upgrades. Took a very manual, very unscalable process and automated it, got a lot more confidence in their processes. How about this case study? https://temporal.io/descript https://temporal.io/descript Descript used Temporal for more reliable, debuggable audio transcription. Took a failure prone process core to the company that was having 1 production outage a week to ~0.
  - daveguy 5y ago
    I didn't word my question correctly. I meant more specific coding examples of how it is used in code and why. Is it similar to any existing frameworks?
    - jbendotnet21 5y ago
      There's loads of code-examples: https://github.com/temporalio/samples-go https://github.com/temporalio/samples-go https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript https://github.com/temporalio/samples-php https://github.com/temporalio/samples-php https://github.com/temporalio/samples-java https://github.com/temporalio/samples-java
      - daveguy 5y ago
        Thank you!
sunny--tech 5y ago
It still boggles my mind that, in an age where K8s is huge and K8s's reconciliation loop pattern is well recognized, Temporal has yet to put "reconciler" or "state-machine" in their documentation or descriptions. I say this as someone who loves using Temporal and see a big future for them. Temporal is a managed state-machine. If you're familiar with K8s, you can think of it as a dedicated reconciler. Plain and simple. Do you want a resource to go from one state to another (i.e. user orders food -> food is delivered) regardless of transient errors and other hiccups? Temporal handles the plumbing of driving your resource to it's desired end state. Do you have a workflow that has multiples steps? Can anyone of those steps fail for whatever reason and you'll need to figure out how to do retrying/cleaning up? Temporal handles that. Essentially you can write your business logic without the worry of including the (often) boilerplate retry, cleanup, scheduling, etc logic. If you're familiar with K8s reconciliation and how it retries failed operations again and again until it reaches the goal, it's much like that. Temporal can do much more than that, but that's its bread and butter and I'm trying to describe it simply so that people can understand. It is a bit of a paradigm shift and has a bit of a learning curve when you first start using it. But like others have said, it's very powerful.
- swyx 5y ago
  ctrl+f "state machine" on this page :) but yeah this is a very good perspective on temporal. we should talk, if you're interested in helping us tell our story better. i'm actually interested in a longer form "Temporal vs K8s" comparison - can make a case for Temporal atop k8s, or Temporal replacing k8s (already had a couple customers talk to us about this). It's a nuanced story to tell and I'm not sure if it has a conclusion.
  - sunny--tech 5y ago
    The company I work at runs a HA setup of Temporal on K8s, so Temporal atop k8s is a great recipe. I'd be curious to hear the reasoning for Temporal replacing K8s (or do you just mean replacing a piece of k8s?) Seeing as how as reconciliation is just a tool it uses for it's container orchestration, not sure Temporal would replace that but an interesting idea nonetheless.
jmcnevin 5y ago
We've been using Temporal for the past year and have found it to be an absolute joy. Being able to model business processes--some of which may take multiple _years_, and require human approval/rejection steps--using procedural go/java/js, and knowing that once that function starts executing, it is basically indestructible (barring the complete destruction of temporal's backend database), is just really cool. Being able to outsource a lot of the complexity involved in using event sourcing to manage distributed transactions frees up our developers to worry about just the high-end business logic. Congrats to the team! I'm excited to see Temporal gaining some more traction.
- swyx 5y ago
  we should put this comment on our landing page and call it a day
  - MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
    > outsource a lot of the complexity involved in using event sourcing Temporal uses/implements/helps implement event sourcing easily?
    - swyx 5y ago
      we use event sourcing under the hood for its fault tolerance and scalability (and tracing/observability). it’s abstracted away for you by our SDKs. in other words when you use us you get the main benefits of ES without the downside of having to code it up yourself, which is a common pitfall of homegrown ES systems.
      - MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
        That's fair but I have a question: If I DID want to get access to the event sourcing mechanisms under the hood - can I? My hypothesis is that I can use Temporal to implement high quality DDD pipelines that follow CQRS - having explicit access to the event sourcing mechanisms would be fantastic! Otherwise, it's an issue as most DBs can be argued to use some form of event sourcing mechanisms under the hood but they arn't built to be exposed outside the DB - hence an event sourcing mechanism has to be reimplemented (hence pitfall of homegrown ES systems). What are your thoughts?
firstfewshells 5y ago
How is this offering different from AWS Step Functions? Looking over their docs briefly, see lots of similarities like Workflows, state management, concurrent executions, retires etc.
- mfateev 5y ago
  The main difference is that workflows are written as code in a general purpose programming language. Java, Go, Javascript/Typescript and PHP are already supported. Python and .NET are under development. AWS Step Functions are using JSON to specify workflow logic. JSON is OK for very simple scenarios, but is not adequate for the majority real business use cases. The fun fact is that Step Functions are a thin layer on top of AWS SWF which is based on the same idea as Temporal. Here is a more detailed answer from Temporal forum: https://community.temporal.io/t/why-use-temporal-over-a-combination-of-aws-step-functions-and-aws-lambda/342/5 https://community.temporal.io/t/why-use-temporal-over-a-comb...
avinassh 5y ago
Pardon me, I haven’t done more research. But how does Temporal save/manage state for Go? Are there any API which let you access state of a Goroutine (like thread state)?
engprod 5y ago
What is interesting is that they portray as if entire Netflix uses this in the home page. From what I know two people at Netflix tried to pitch and even implemented it in their projects. The rest of the company still uses other things and they have their own similar tool. Seems like false marketing to me.
- jusonchan81 5y ago
  Thats interesting, I went to their Conductor meetup last week and someone asked this question on whether Conductor is being replaced. They confirmed that one team is trying Temporal and Conductor is the primary orchestration tool in Netflix. There is a lot of new buzz around Conductor now given recent meetup. I reached out to the guy trying Temporal at Netflix, apparently he never tried Conductor first. Big company problems I guess. It will be interesting to see the future of Conductor given the Temporal efforts.

92 points by roopakv 5y ago

The technology is interesting but honestly I don't recommend it to any early stage startup as it has a very high learning curve, high maintainability, limited visibility and so on. Maybe if you got to a stage that you have a problem that temporal can solve and a separate team that can keep it alive and debug it.

roopakv 5y ago
I get where you are coming from. However with their cloud offering you get to forget about some of the not easy parts of Temporal and just build something awesome while benefiting from all that temporal has to offer :)
- yevpats 5y ago
  I agree it might solve part of the problem but I wouldn't jump into this on day 1 of your startup as because its a framework/platform you will be betting your whole company on this. Im not saying its not good just giving a warning to very early stage startups to try and use something like this when they have a problem and not before.
  - debuggerpk 5y ago
swyx 5y ago
for what its worth we do have a super early stage (preseed) startup building on us and they're happy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHifpzMn6kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHifpzMn6kA but yeah I would never say that we're for everyone. depends on your knowledge, needs, usecases!
jusonchan81 5y ago
This is true, we tried and abandoned it. Felt like shifting the problem from one place to another

josephg 5y ago

What is temporal, in plain English? I can’t make heads or tails of it from either this letter or from their homepage.

dustrider 5y ago
This seems to do a better job of explaining https://docs.temporal.io/docs/temporal-explained/introduction https://docs.temporal.io/docs/temporal-explained/introductio... From my take, an interesting way of dealing with scalable workflows and batch jobs. But I need to read more into it.
chugh09 5y ago
This blog does a good job of explaining it in plain english imo: https://docs.temporal.io/blog/charles-zedlewski-why-i-joined-temporal https://docs.temporal.io/blog/charles-zedlewski-why-i-joined... ctrl + F to here "Temporal is a new kind of platform. It’s not a database, cache, queue, or a means to run your code. It’s a runtime for distributed applications that transparently manages their state at any scope and scale. By externalizing state to a generalized platform like Temporal, application teams get to outsource the majority of cross-cutting concerns presented by cloud applications. In doing so, applications become" if you dont want to read the whole thing
djmagee 5y ago
Another excellent overview was just published this morning by Bryan Offutt: https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-our-investment-in-temporal/ https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-w...
rylandgold 5y ago
Hey, I'm Ryland and I work at Temporal. Temporal provides a unified backend for automatically managing implicit application state that is normally stored in transient queues, databases etc. Furthermore, Temporal does this without explicitly requiring the developer to think about and manage the state themselves. This means developers spend way more time building stuff that actually matters, and less time writing buggy reliability code. I personally find the best way to explain it is with an analogy. Back in the late 90s many developers built applications with C and therefore had to manage their own memory. For a long time, this was not wasted effort as it was the only real option. But then, Java came around and offered an experience where developers didn't have to manage their memory. And for the majority of apps, the performance and capabilities of Java were more than sufficient. At this point, writing the average application in C meant you were doing a serious amount of undifferentiated work. Furthermore, most developers weren't that great at memory management so choosing to do it by hand meant more work for a worse result. The value proposition of Temporal is nearly identical, but instead of manually managing memory with C, developers are manually managing state using queues, CRON services, databases and more. The result is a bunch of time spent doing undifferentiated things that a computer would have done better anyway.

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atarian 5y ago

Was this company launched by Uber or is it just based on Uber's open-source work? EDIT: According to https://blog.amplifypartners.com/our-investment-in-temporal/ https://blog.amplifypartners.com/our-investment-in-temporal/, Temporal was founded by 2 engineers at Uber who created an open-source orchestration engine called Cadence and then later decided to found Temporal.

swyx 5y ago
yes correct. open source project started at Uber, project leads left and forked Cadence to start Temporal. origin story on podcast here https://docs.temporal.io/blog/gremlin-podcast#origin-story-of-temporal https://docs.temporal.io/blog/gremlin-podcast#origin-story-o...
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Shades of Amazon Simple Workflow, which was anything but simple... (: It stands along side SimpleDB as a deprecated AWS service (unofficially), no less. I guess, AWS gave up too soon on Maxim's vision.
  - swyx 5y ago
    i think its more that it took Max ~6 more years after building SWF + getting experience at Google + Uber before he finally got to the right abstraction with Temporal

Thaxll 5y ago

Temporal is such a powerful tool, really don't rollout your own job system using pub/sub, just use Temporal. At first it looks easy to use any pub/sub or DB to create a job system, but there are so many edge cases, I'm not even talking about scaling etc ... just having a solid job system that properly handle retries, error, durability, timeout etc ...

djmagee 5y ago
IMO, this is the value of Temporal. You certainly can write your own system—but wouldn't you rather focus on writing code that directly addresses the unique value that you or your company offers?
- echelon 5y ago
  Build vs buy is hard. Generally you're correct, but then when your tool gets bought out by eg. Splunk (or whomever) and they raise the price 2-5x, you're kind of stuck. Every 3rd party dependency is a complexity you must manage. Every in house system is a complexity you must manage. Nothing is free.
  - mkoubaa 5y ago
    It's free as in puppy
  - swyx 5y ago
    mark my words - temporal will be bigger than Splunk in 5 years. just way bigger TAM.
    - echelon 5y ago
      Best of luck! Love the energy and excitement. :)
    - throwoutway 5y ago
      Splunk’s addressable market is every business right? How is Temporal larger than that? Consumers too?

wmf 5y ago

This headline really makes good news look like bad news.

jrockway 5y ago
Yup. I expected a shutdown, a response to widespread harassment allegations, or some sort of open source license change. But it's none of those things, they got funded!
swyx 5y ago
title was fixed by dang! fortunately he knows HN better than we do...

swyx 5y ago

This letter is timed with our Series B announcement today! We just did a 1hr livestream here giving context and answering Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40KwlxZJFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40KwlxZJFI Additional coverage for more info: - https://www.geekwire.com/2022/temporal-is-a-unicorn-developer-productivity-startup-lands-120m-at-1-5b-valuation/ https://www.geekwire.com/2022/temporal-is-a-unicorn-develope... - https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/16/temporal_103m_funding/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/16/temporal_103m_funding... - https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/16/temporal-raises-103-million-accelerate-development-stateful-cloud-applications/ https://siliconangle.com/2022/02/16/temporal-raises-103-mill... - https://dailyuknews.com/tech/temporal-raises-103m-in-series-b-funding/ https://dailyuknews.com/tech/temporal-raises-103m-in-series-... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/temporal-io-raises-103-million-170000698.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/temporal-io-raises-103-millio... - https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/Temporal-calls-time-on-cloud-app-state-management https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/Tem... - https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-workflow-our-investment-in-temporal/ https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/everything-is-a-w...

ctvo 5y ago
Love Temporal. Hope you solve the infrastructure and cloud story with this. The biggest pain point is still deploying and configuring a production environment. I started suspecting it was so awful and poorly documented to push us to using the cloud offering, but then I couldn’t even find a link to sign up for cloud.
- swyx 5y ago
  yup. we are equal opportunity awful! real answer is it's just really hard. even for us, much less the general developer audience. i wrote the docs we do have, and yeah it shows and I'm not proud of it. Temporal's initial demographic was entirely self sufficient in terms of devops knowledge to take the helm charts and docker stuff we have and translate it to their environment, and read source code/talk to us to fill in any gaps. But as we grow then we'll have to provide more and more rails for people who don't do that stuff. tldr we hear you and a big chunk of this money will go toward both better docs and training for both open source and cloud users.

jvican 5y ago

Would really love to see movement on integrating Temporal better with Scala on the JVM, just like it supports Java and Kotlin now. Would love to collaborate or help making this thing happen if you have many things on your plate.

stock_toaster 5y ago
Looking at temporal as someone who has used scala with akka, I would also love to see better scala support!
spikhalskiy 5y ago
Temporal JavaSDK may get a temporal-scala module the same way it has temporal-kotlin with extension functions and method pointer "disassembling" . Reach out to @Dmitry at temporal support Slack if you want to contribute.
- jvican 5y ago
  Thanks, I'll reach out soon.

rrix2 5y ago

Congrats to the folks involved. Building a long running (hours to days) workflow pipeline on top of Cadence was some of the most fun I had writing code at Uber. Stellar tooling, stellar team.

swyx 5y ago
not too late to join us :)

shuntress 5y ago

So... what actually is it? I've seen the other comments, I've clicked the links and scanned the blog posts. I get that it is a "resilient workflow engine" or whatever. If my SQL & PHP backend serving a basic web API to a React storefront is struggling to handle customer's states (carts, lists, orders, etc) how is this going to help? What are my engineers going to actually do?

stevekinney 5y ago
For me, the compelling part was at my last company, we'd build these complicated distributed systems with a whole lot moving pieces—any of which could go down at a moment's notice. For a complex enough system, there was sometimes more work to be done to deal with any part of the system failing than to build the system itself. Basically, we were implementing our own bespoke version of Temporal over and over again. To your point, the complexity of a SQL/PHP application is significantly smaller, but, the value proposition of Temporal is probably still there: If any part of the checkout process fails (e.g. charging the credit card, successfully triggering the order after they've charged the credit card, timing an email if there is an abandoned cart, handling the moving pieces of a return). These pieces are either handled manually by a human or you've got a decent amount of business logic in place to handle each of these edge cases individually. The value-add of Temporal—in this case—would be that it would keep track of where the customer/order was in the overall flow of ordering something and pick up where it left off in the event that something went wrong.
swyx 5y ago
hey! so we actually have a React + Temporal example: https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript/tree/main/nextjs-ecommerce-oneclick https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript/tree/main/n... (9 minute demo/talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRYozSljSpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRYozSljSpw) when you are handling your customers' states, every purchase is a long running process, both from an ordering side and a fulfilment perspective. Work needs to be done asynchronously, or you need to wait for some condition to be met to proceed, etc. Temporal makes it so that you don't have to glue together a bunch of schedulers and queues and databases and ad hoc state machines to make that work, make it traceable/debuggable, and make that scale. Your engineers would be able to translate your business requirements directly into workflow code (often just a function) and be able to version control, test, migrate, lint, etc, rather than have that logic spread out over a bunch of your code and infra structure. they would then register it with their Temporal workers, and then invoke/signal those workflows from your php/node/whatever application code. i did a demo recently of what its like to translate product specs to a workflow, like @rrix is saying in another comment, its pretty fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxZgGhT-Xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxZgGhT-Xo

eezurr 5y ago

Im reading the description of this service via the multiple questions asking what Temporal is. So now I am curious, could this be pivoted to work in game development? I understand that is not your target audience, but state management is a necessary part game dev.

lorendsr 5y ago
It certainly could, but not a fit for a real-time game. In order to make Temporal general-purpose, fault-tolerant, and scalable, it had to do more database writes / have higher latency than real-time game backends.

daveguy 5y ago

Can someone point me to a simple example use case and why temporal is beneficial? The website has a lot of temporal-specific jargon and not a lot of straightforward examples.

swyx 5y ago
How about this case study? https://temporal.io/datadog https://temporal.io/datadog Datadog used Temporal to automate database upgrades. Took a very manual, very unscalable process and automated it, got a lot more confidence in their processes. How about this case study? https://temporal.io/descript https://temporal.io/descript Descript used Temporal for more reliable, debuggable audio transcription. Took a failure prone process core to the company that was having 1 production outage a week to ~0.
- daveguy 5y ago
  I didn't word my question correctly. I meant more specific coding examples of how it is used in code and why. Is it similar to any existing frameworks?
  - jbendotnet21 5y ago
    There's loads of code-examples: https://github.com/temporalio/samples-go https://github.com/temporalio/samples-go https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript https://github.com/temporalio/samples-typescript https://github.com/temporalio/samples-php https://github.com/temporalio/samples-php https://github.com/temporalio/samples-java https://github.com/temporalio/samples-java
    - daveguy 5y ago
      Thank you!

sunny--tech 5y ago

It still boggles my mind that, in an age where K8s is huge and K8s's reconciliation loop pattern is well recognized, Temporal has yet to put "reconciler" or "state-machine" in their documentation or descriptions. I say this as someone who loves using Temporal and see a big future for them. Temporal is a managed state-machine. If you're familiar with K8s, you can think of it as a dedicated reconciler. Plain and simple. Do you want a resource to go from one state to another (i.e. user orders food -> food is delivered) regardless of transient errors and other hiccups? Temporal handles the plumbing of driving your resource to it's desired end state. Do you have a workflow that has multiples steps? Can anyone of those steps fail for whatever reason and you'll need to figure out how to do retrying/cleaning up? Temporal handles that. Essentially you can write your business logic without the worry of including the (often) boilerplate retry, cleanup, scheduling, etc logic. If you're familiar with K8s reconciliation and how it retries failed operations again and again until it reaches the goal, it's much like that. Temporal can do much more than that, but that's its bread and butter and I'm trying to describe it simply so that people can understand. It is a bit of a paradigm shift and has a bit of a learning curve when you first start using it. But like others have said, it's very powerful.

swyx 5y ago
ctrl+f "state machine" on this page :) but yeah this is a very good perspective on temporal. we should talk, if you're interested in helping us tell our story better. i'm actually interested in a longer form "Temporal vs K8s" comparison - can make a case for Temporal atop k8s, or Temporal replacing k8s (already had a couple customers talk to us about this). It's a nuanced story to tell and I'm not sure if it has a conclusion.
- sunny--tech 5y ago
  The company I work at runs a HA setup of Temporal on K8s, so Temporal atop k8s is a great recipe. I'd be curious to hear the reasoning for Temporal replacing K8s (or do you just mean replacing a piece of k8s?) Seeing as how as reconciliation is just a tool it uses for it's container orchestration, not sure Temporal would replace that but an interesting idea nonetheless.

jmcnevin 5y ago

We've been using Temporal for the past year and have found it to be an absolute joy. Being able to model business processes--some of which may take multiple _years_, and require human approval/rejection steps--using procedural go/java/js, and knowing that once that function starts executing, it is basically indestructible (barring the complete destruction of temporal's backend database), is just really cool. Being able to outsource a lot of the complexity involved in using event sourcing to manage distributed transactions frees up our developers to worry about just the high-end business logic. Congrats to the team! I'm excited to see Temporal gaining some more traction.

swyx 5y ago
we should put this comment on our landing page and call it a day
- MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
  > outsource a lot of the complexity involved in using event sourcing Temporal uses/implements/helps implement event sourcing easily?
  - swyx 5y ago
    we use event sourcing under the hood for its fault tolerance and scalability (and tracing/observability). it’s abstracted away for you by our SDKs. in other words when you use us you get the main benefits of ES without the downside of having to code it up yourself, which is a common pitfall of homegrown ES systems.
    - MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
      That's fair but I have a question: If I DID want to get access to the event sourcing mechanisms under the hood - can I? My hypothesis is that I can use Temporal to implement high quality DDD pipelines that follow CQRS - having explicit access to the event sourcing mechanisms would be fantastic! Otherwise, it's an issue as most DBs can be argued to use some form of event sourcing mechanisms under the hood but they arn't built to be exposed outside the DB - hence an event sourcing mechanism has to be reimplemented (hence pitfall of homegrown ES systems). What are your thoughts?

firstfewshells 5y ago

How is this offering different from AWS Step Functions? Looking over their docs briefly, see lots of similarities like Workflows, state management, concurrent executions, retires etc.

mfateev 5y ago
The main difference is that workflows are written as code in a general purpose programming language. Java, Go, Javascript/Typescript and PHP are already supported. Python and .NET are under development. AWS Step Functions are using JSON to specify workflow logic. JSON is OK for very simple scenarios, but is not adequate for the majority real business use cases. The fun fact is that Step Functions are a thin layer on top of AWS SWF which is based on the same idea as Temporal. Here is a more detailed answer from Temporal forum: https://community.temporal.io/t/why-use-temporal-over-a-combination-of-aws-step-functions-and-aws-lambda/342/5 https://community.temporal.io/t/why-use-temporal-over-a-comb...

avinassh 5y ago

Pardon me, I haven’t done more research. But how does Temporal save/manage state for Go? Are there any API which let you access state of a Goroutine (like thread state)?

engprod 5y ago

What is interesting is that they portray as if entire Netflix uses this in the home page. From what I know two people at Netflix tried to pitch and even implemented it in their projects. The rest of the company still uses other things and they have their own similar tool. Seems like false marketing to me.

jusonchan81 5y ago
Thats interesting, I went to their Conductor meetup last week and someone asked this question on whether Conductor is being replaced. They confirmed that one team is trying Temporal and Conductor is the primary orchestration tool in Netflix. There is a lot of new buzz around Conductor now given recent meetup. I reached out to the guy trying Temporal at Netflix, apparently he never tried Conductor first. Big company problems I guess. It will be interesting to see the future of Conductor given the Temporal efforts.