Lessons learned using Temporal to run Temporal Cloud
summary
Temporal Cloud runs its control plane on Temporal, processing about 1.8 billion actions/month, with ~11,000 commits, 30+ contributors and 600 workflow/activity types, deployed daily on AWS EKS using Go, Postgres, S3, Kinesis and Firehose. Control logic uses an entity workflow per resource with signalWithStart and continuous-new runs to avoid concurrent updates; optimistic concurrency via e‑tags protects external mutations. Long requests map to request workflows; unreliable background tasks use abandoned child workflows. Payloads encrypt with a codec server for UI decryption. Cross-namespace calls use Nexus.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 4:26Execution patterns for resources
- 12:54Modeling long-running requests
- 15:45Reliability security and operations
- 19:40Activity timeouts and reliability
- 25:22Cross-namespace workflows
- 30:35Key learnings and conclusion
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