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Cadence (Uber)

Cadence (cadenceworkflow.io) is the durable-workflow engine originally built at Uber. A user writes workflow logic as ordinary code; Cadence persists the event history, re-hydrates workflow state on worker restart, retries failed activities, and supports long-running timers measured in hours or days. The authors of Cadence later founded Temporal, which is both an evolution and the commercial successor.

Stub page — expand on future Cadence-internals sources.

Lineage note

From JP Phillips's 2025-02-12 Fly.io exit interview:

Cadence is the child of AWS Step Functions and the predecessor to Temporal (the company). (Source: sources/2025-02-12-flyio-the-exit-interview-jp-phillips)

Role in the wiki

Ancestor of Fly.io's flyd FSM design

JP Phillips — who built flyd at Fly.io — cites prior experience using Cadence at HashiCorp as one of the two direct influences on flyd's FSM-with-durable-steps design (the other being Compose.io / MongoHQ's "recipes/operations"):

I definitely didn't have any specific design in mind when I started on flyd. I think the FSM stuff is a result of work I did at Compose.io / MongoHQ (where it was called 'recipes' / 'operations') and the work I did at HashiCorp using Cadence.

Once I understood what the product needed to do and look like, having a way to perform deterministic and durable execution felt like a good design.

… One of the biggest gains, with how it works in flyd, is knowing we would need to deploy flyd all day, every day. If flyd was in the middle of doing some work, it needed to pick back up right where it left off, post-deploy. (Source: sources/2025-02-12-flyio-the-exit-interview-jp-phillips)

Cadence is lineage, not a runtime dependency — flyd runs on Go + BoltDB with its own in-process FSM code, not on a Cadence cluster.

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