Idempotency and Durable Execution

published on 2024/03/17

Temporal allows developers to avoid coding for infrastructure nuances and other inevitable failures, focusing on what matters: coding the process they are trying to implement. It would be nice if you could code up the high-level process, but not worry about the underlying or external systems, right? Except you have to at some point interact with those systems. So we separate out those two concerns into “Workflows” and “Activities” respectively.

Workflow code concerns itself with the higher-level business logic of the application. Activity code focuses on more granular functions such as writing to a database, calling a service, or processes that could be longer running or even blocking in nature.

Temporal is an event-sourced system and each Workflow has its own event history. Temporal will maintain the state of the Workflow and continually progress each Workflow to completion regardless of any failures. In addition, Temporal provides built-in retry logic for Activities, and since Activities are just events in the Workflow history, Temporal is able to guarantee “at least once” execution.

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