Temporal
Durable execution for long-running, reliable workflows
Temporal is profiled here as a DevOps tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Temporal is an open-source durable execution platform founded in 2019 by Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, who previously built similar systems at Uber and Amazon. It runs workflows as ordinary code while persisting every step, so a process survives crashes, restarts, and outages and resumes exactly where it stopped. Long-running agent pipelines and multi-service orchestrations adopt it because the platform absorbs the retry and checkpoint logic these workflows would otherwise require by hand. Many companies now anchor reliability-critical processes on it, including financial transactions and provisioning steps that must never lose state. Signals and queries let external systems interact with a workflow while it runs.
Key Capabilities:
Durable execution that survives failures and resumes state
Workflows authored as code in Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, and .NET
Automatic retries and timeout handling for activities
Long-running workflows spanning days or months
Signals and queries for interacting with running workflows
MIT-licensed server with Temporal Cloud as the managed option
Alternative tools
- Prefect
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- OpenTelemetry
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- Prometheus
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- Grafana
Open-source dashboards and visualization for all your metrics
- Porter
Platform-as-a-service that runs in your own cloud account
- Kamal
Deploy containerized apps to your own servers