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Temporal
Durable workflow execution — workflows survive crashes and resume exactly where they left off.
0Open Source
Workflow Engines
Overview
Temporal is a durable workflow execution platform that runs business logic as fault-tolerant workflows — automatically persisting state and replaying execution history so workflows survive process crashes, network failures, and server restarts without any application-level retry logic.
Key Features
- Durable execution — workflow state persisted automatically, resumes after any failure
- Language-native SDKs for Go, Python, Java, TypeScript, and .NET
- Activities for encapsulating unreliable external calls with configurable retries
- Signals and queries for real-time interaction with running workflows
- Timers that work across process restarts — schedule events days or weeks into the future
- Temporal Cloud fully managed service with 99.99% SLA
Real-World Workflows
Long-running order fulfillment workflow
- 1Define a workflow that: reserves inventory → charges payment → ships → sends confirmation
- 2Each step is an Activity with automatic retry on transient failures
- 3Workflow pauses and waits for a Signal from the shipping system
- 4If any step fails after retries, compensation logic rolls back previous steps
User onboarding sequence with wait steps
- 1Start a workflow when a user signs up
- 2Send welcome email, wait 1 day, check if the user completed setup
- 3If not, send a reminder — wait 3 more days before escalating
- 4Workflow state is preserved across all waits — no cron jobs or queues needed
Getting Started
# Start Temporal server locally
brew install temporal
temporal server start-dev
# Install Python SDK
pip install temporalio
# Define a workflow
from temporalio import workflow, activity
@workflow.defn
class MyWorkflow:
@workflow.run
async def run(self, name: str) -> str:
return await workflow.execute_activity(
greet, name, start_to_close_timeout=timedelta(seconds=10)
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