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inglorHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

In the last two years, we built (with a team of 15, now 100) a billion dollar business on top of …

In the last two years, we built (with a team of 15, now 100) a billion dollar business on top of Temporal that performs business critical applications for fortune 500 companies. We couldn't be happier with temporal. Determinism sucks, you do have to work hard and make everything idempotent in activities like we would for durable software anyway. The language we used was incorrect (Go) and has a lot of boilerplate compared to alternatives we later investigated (Python and TypeScript). Visibility can be slow and misses information. We needed to write our own APIs to work effectively with Agents for root-cause analysis of failures. With all the caveats - Temporal is amazing, it feels much better than previous orchestrators I used like Prefect or Airflow. 100% would adopt again.

Original discussionSQLite is all you need for durable workflows387 source comments · at import
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FC
fcarraldoHN

It sounds like you’re running this mostly on a single machine? Temporal gets much more complex with scale. Cassandra isn’t fun to manage. Ringpop and TChannel are hard to debug when things go wrong. The SQL backend support doesn’t support horizontally scaled replicas (just single instance) due to consistency requirements. Depending on how your code is written, modifying code baked into workflows becomes complex, as anything that modifies the history event ordering breaks determinism in already-deployed workers. We use it heavily and everyone who started on it doing simple scripting/automation all love it, everyone who built real production systems on top of it all hate it. Possibly operator error, but my experience hasn’t matched the rosy picture painted in these comments.

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UnfitFootprintHN

Could you share a bit more about your learnings on go + temporal? That combo was next in line for us to migrate _to_

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bitexploderHN

That is the real truth people are voicing when they say Temporal is heavy. They are really saying: Durable, reliable, distributed workloads are hard and it takes effort to manage! And that is true. I know of no systems that make that genuinely easy. It is a hard discipline. Maybe Temporal makes that harder than it should be, but I have no experience there. There are no free lunches in this space. I have no idea how good or bad Temporal is since my usage is pretty small and isolated, but software rarely just works and impresses me and Temporal for my local machine orchestrating genuinely did. I think Netflix's conductor is another cool option, but I ended up with Temporal due to license.

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