SYSTEM Cited by 3 sources
Temporal¶
Temporal is a durable workflow-orchestration engine — write workflow logic as regular code; Temporal handles persistence, retry, rollback, long-running timers, and replay across process restarts. Originally a fork of Uber's Cadence; now a standalone OSS + commercial offering.
Stub page — expand on future Temporal-internals sources.
Role in the wiki¶
Datadog CDC pipeline provisioning (2025-11-04)¶
Datadog uses Temporal workflows as the automation layer over
CDC pipeline provisioning. The manual runbook for standing up
a Postgres-to-Kafka-to-Elasticsearch pipeline is 7 steps (enable
wal_level=logical, create Postgres users, create publications +
slots, deploy Debezium, create Kafka topics, set up heartbeat
tables, configure sink connectors); Datadog decomposes each step
into a Temporal activity and composes them into higher-level
provisioning workflows.
"Using Temporal workflows, we broke the provisioning process into modular, reliable tasks — then stitched them together into higher-level orchestrations. This made it easy for teams to create, manage, and experiment with new replication pipelines without getting bogged down in manual, error-prone steps." (Source: sources/2025-11-04-datadog-replication-redefined-multi-tenant-cdc-platform)
Durable-execution properties the workflow-engine layer inherits: per-activity retry, replay across worker crashes, first-class long-running timers (waiting for a slot LSN to advance, waiting for a sink to catch up), compensation branches for partial-failure cleanup, and a queryable event history per provisioning instance. See patterns/workflow-orchestrated-pipeline-provisioning for the general shape.
OSS-on-Kubernetes case study (Figma, 2024-08-08)¶
Cited as a concrete example of OSS software teams at Figma wanted to run: easy to install on Kubernetes via Helm, but would have required hand-porting into systems/terraform on ECS. Part of the motivating case for the ECS→EKS migration. (Source: sources/2024-08-08-figma-migrated-onto-k8s-in-less-than-12-months)
Seen in¶
- sources/2025-11-04-datadog-replication-redefined-multi-tenant-cdc-platform — automation substrate under Datadog's managed multi-tenant CDC replication platform; wraps Debezium + Kafka Connect pipeline provisioning into durable workflows. Canonical wiki instance of patterns/workflow-orchestrated-pipeline-provisioning.
- sources/2024-08-08-figma-migrated-onto-k8s-in-less-than-12-months — cited as OSS-on-Kubernetes example motivating the Helm-ecosystem pitch; not a Temporal-internals ingest.
- sources/2025-02-12-flyio-the-exit-interview-jp-phillips — lineage citation via Cadence. JP Phillips, who built Fly.io flyd, names Cadence (Temporal's predecessor) as one of two direct influences on flyd's FSM design; also frames Cadence as "child of AWS Step Functions and the predecessor to Temporal (the company)" — useful single-source lineage statement.
Related¶
- systems/kubernetes — deployment substrate for hosted Temporal.
- systems/cadence — predecessor project, same core team pre-Temporal.
- systems/flyd — Fly.io orchestrator whose FSM design is ancestry-linked to Cadence, the Temporal predecessor.
- concepts/durable-execution — the broader concept Temporal realises.
- patterns/workflow-orchestrated-pipeline-provisioning — canonical pattern Temporal is used for in the wiki.