See the Intro for context.
[20221231] Temporal.io – With Temporal, you write your various complex, potentially long-running actions as normal, synchronous code, which Temporal “magically” turns into distributed, asynchronous, automatically retried, idempotent jobs. The design is really elegant, and removes all of the hard work from writing code that must keep things in sync and handle failures through queueing and retrying. (as described in this Hacker News comment) Also: Temporal jobs/tasks are called workflows because the code is effectively translated into workflow steps—i.e. code progress is made by workers, and each step is persisted so that if the worker dies, you don’t lose anything—another worker picks up in the exact same place in the code, with all local variables and threads intact. It also provides helpful built-in features like retries and timeouts of anything that might fail, like network requests, and the ability to “sleep” for arbitrary periods without consuming threads/resources (other than a timer in a database that is automatically set up for you when you call `sleep(‘1 month’)`).