Temporal Cloud (credits)

The main purposes for using Temporal  are automation flows, especially financial automations and supply chain automations. Our company name is SR, we are a digital-first CPG brand making company, managing over 70 brands, and managing the supply chain in terms of POs, transfer orders, and moving stock between 3PL to Amazon and vice versa involves a workflow process that could include manual or automated steps, and for everything, we use Temporal .

We are just a customer; we directly use it for our internal use cases, building software for our company, and we are not a reseller or any of those modes.

Our workflows are pretty straightforward, not involving multi-step or multi-stage workflows. It's more about making sure it is an automated workflow, not big complex workflows. Therefore, the basic retry mechanisms are solving our needs, and we haven't explored the advanced capabilities yet, as our problems are already resolved.

In terms of scalability, it is the best feature. I did use Camunda  in the past for almost three years, and resource constraints-wise, Temporal is much more prudent in doing the work. While Camunda  comes with an exceptional UI and more forms, for our use case, pace is more important than actually the UI. Hence, I would say Temporal is working in the right way.

The deployment process is quite straightforward as it provides both Kubernetes  and Docker Compose  versions, allowing us to run it in ECS containers, and I find it simple for both Camunda and Temporal.

The only area for improvement in Temporal is the UI. I know it is a non-UI first product, but comparing Camunda versus Temporal UI, there is a difference. Moreover, n8n , being a no-code platform, is easier for business people when writing workflows. Hence, we maintain two systems today: n8n  for no-code solutions where business automations can be managed, and Temporal for mission-critical systems which cannot fail.

We have been using the solution for roughly about eight months now, not one year.

I do not see performance issues or latency problems with Temporal; the stability largely depends on how we write the code rather than the tool itself. Both Camunda and Temporal are stable as long as we adhere to proper design patterns.

I am tight on schedule today. We can discuss Camunda sometime later, but I can only provide insights on Camunda 7, as I chose Temporal over Camunda 7 for production use.

We haven't engaged any Temporal experts; we've learned everything from their documentation, which I find helpful and clear with examples.

The ROI is apparent in terms of business case automation; previously, a bunch of people filled in data in NetSuite or managed stocks between warehouses and Amazon, but now everything is automated, saving time. We have streamlined processes and saved roughly 300 to 400k in chargebacks, considering our revenue is around 0.5 billion a year.

In terms of pricing, Camunda is indeed costlier than Temporal. The cloud deployment costs differ, and while Camunda 7 can be cheaper due to its integrated setup, comparing latest versions between Temporal versus Camunda 8 is not straightforward. Temporal is faster and cheaper regarding our use cases.

My overall experience with Temporal is rated between 8 to 9, mainly due to a learning curve that only senior developers can navigate effectively, which makes it a bit challenging for junior developers.

We don't have any instances of on-premise, so I cannot comment on that because we are a first company, with all services deployed on cloud infrastructure.

Most of the integration is through RPC or APIs, ensuring all our systems are in cohesion.

We do state persistence to a Postgres instance, and we have modified it to our use case with better indexing. And for fault tolerance, we built a queue and an alerting mechanism that notifies us if any workflows fail after specific failure points so we can act upon it.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Temporal an 8.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

What do you like best about the product?

Developers are very familar with using abstractions to avoid having to write common, low-level interfaces for things like databases, messaging or interacting with APIs. Temporal abstracts away the tedious, low-level code that is always needed to ensure resiliency when interacting with external processes or APIs that might fail or take a long time to respond.

By using straightforward SDKs available in the most popular language frameworks, developers can use Temporal to apply policy-based approaches to retrying calls that might fail due to failed connections or rate-limits so that the right things happen on a consistent basis.

Temporal also takes care of the complexities of managing long-running processes where something needs to happen in the future whether that is minutes, days or months down the road. If your app needs to initiate a process that requires some human interaction (approvals, uploads, certifications, etc), Temporal tracks those human-in-the-loop interactions and automatically advances the process to the next step when ready.

Temporal Cloud provides managed Temporal infrastructure so that you can not only get started quickly , but also can avoid the challenges of operating more self-hosted infrastructure. The Temporal UI and APIs provide robust troubleshooting and auditing capabilities so that you can see at a glance or investigate in great detail what is happening with your business procesess.

Temporal is not workflow as many of us experienced it in the past (heavy XML standards, pretty diagrams that were hard to customize). Workflows and activities in Temporal are just code that leverages Temporal SDKs to abstract away the cruft of resiliency and reliability that every developer needs, but seldom wants to create from scratch.

What do you dislike about the product?

Temporal Cloud requires security certificates to ensure that data is encrypted both in motion and at rest. This adds complexity but allows Temporal Cloud to support highly-regulated environments like financial services, healthcare and e-commerce payment processing.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Modernizing existing applications to improve their reliability and resiliency without rewriting them completely,
Creating new apps that require long-duration workflows. One example is managing a payment that requires multiple parties to indicate approval through a manual step such as certifying agreement or uploading a contract.
Automating infrastructure provisioning steps in cases where the cloud provider may take a long time to complete the task which could fail
Orchestrating multiple steps to ingest data and submit it to long-running AI/ML engines for enrichment or recommendation
Troubleshooting processes that may have failed or become "stuck" due to issues in downstream applications

In general, we use Temporal  for workflow management. Some of the information is private because I work for a private company.

Temporal  allows retryability for different workflows whenever they fail. It helps us to retry workflows without worrying about idempotence and ensures things get done.

Temporal allows retryability for different workflows whenever they fail. It helps ensure idempotence and that things get done.

Retro compatibility needs improvement. Sometimes, when we make new changes to a workflow, it fails if it is not configured properly due to compatibility issues. I wish this could be improved so developers wouldn't have to worry about compatibility.

I have been using Temporal for about a year.

In terms of stability, I would rate it a nine as long as the developer doesn't make mistakes.

It is pretty good in terms of scalability. We haven't had any issues as long as it is in the cloud.

I have not contacted their support team directly, but when I read through their blog posts and see the responses, they seem to be doing pretty well.

Positive

I used RabbitMQ in my personal projects before using Temporal.

The initial setup is of medium complexity.

Temporal is a pretty good product for workflow management.

Public Cloud

Other

We use Temporal to manage workflows for a client project involving interactions with MongoDB. We needed a framework to manage workflows and set the correct order and timing. We chose Temporal over Azure Functions because it worked better for our needs.

What I like best about the tool is that it's easy to install, especially since it uses JavaScript. It's also easy to set up with Docker, and the documentation is easy to understand.

Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have.

I have been using the product for a year. 

I haven't experienced any stability issues or bugs with Temporal. Any problems I encountered were more related to our specific project than the tool itself.

I think Temporal's scalability is very high. While our current project hasn't required much scaling yet, I can see the benefits for future use. I'd rate its scalability as an eight out of ten, mainly because it was easy to implement with Docker. 

In my organization, at least three people used Temporal when I was involved in the project.

I haven't contacted the support. I can manage with the documentation. 

Before implementing Temporal, we struggled with Azure Functions, which was hard to understand and manage. Temporal made it clearer how the workflow would function from start to finish.

Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features.

You need to know Node.js, Express, and Docker to use the tool effectively. Docker is particularly important for easy setup and image mounting.

Overall, I'd give the tool a solid an eight out of ten. It's easy to use and start up, making it simple to begin a project.

I would recommend Temporal to others. My advice would be to clearly understand Docker, as it goes hand-in-hand with using Temporal for setup and implementation. I'd also recommend reading the documentation about creating plugins for Temporal to understand how to build workflows for any project.

We needed to implement different workflows for various processes, each involving distinct steps. We used these workflows to handle large data flows or complex operations within our system. We employed them to limit rates, as it was the simplest solution. Furthermore, we implemented some cron jobs, not because they were required but because we wanted to avoid excessive zooming.

It is fairly easy, though it has some undefined aspects if you're unfamiliar with it. For instance, you need to properly define your functions and handle various small issues that can arise. It's easy to get started and user-friendly. There are some internal challenges. For example, I initially missed some error handling and connectivity issues, which led to problems because I implemented things incorrectly. 

I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities. I encountered issues with this and explored various approaches. I decided to store the data in files, but there were other methods. This was redundant because it added complexity to the implementation, making it more challenging to manage.

I have been using Temporal for about a year.

Due to an overload on our cluster, we encountered some problems. We started too many tasks simultaneously. Initially, we attempted to run many tasks at once, but this approach caused issues.

I rate the solution’s stability a five out of ten.

The system has good scalability, though it does have some limitations. For instance, Postgres handles scalability well up to a certain point, typically around eight to ten instances. Using a NoSQL database might address some scaling issues more effectively. Postgres was sufficient, and we could work within its constraints.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

You can use it for free if you want.

In most cases, you don't need extensive prior knowledge to use this technology; the documentation is usually sufficient. It was likely my mistake for not understanding the problem correctly, even though it was logically straightforward. Fortunately, we had an experienced developer on our team who helped me identify some best practices.

I recommend this technology even to large tech companies. It’s pretty substantial and impactful. I suggest reading the documentation more carefully, as it affected my experience.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.