标签：#temporal

When 150,000 tickets went on sale for The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, they sold out almost instantly. But plans change, cancellations happen, and good seats randomly open up at odd hours. To solve this, Andrew Baker from Temporal built IMAXXING : a service that monitors every 70mm IMAX showing across the US and alerts subscribers the moment great seats become available. What started as a fun weekend project quickly scaled, now over 9,000 users. I sat down with Andrew to break down the architecture: how durable execution keeps long-running workflows alive, how to debounce alerts so you don't spam users, and how serverless workers on Google Cloud Run handle sudden spikes in demand without overprovisioning. What's in the video Durable execution 101: How Temporal allows you to rewind history to the point of failure. The Entity Workflow pattern: Why there is one persistent workflow per user subscription and separate monitoring workflows per showing across the country. Signals & smart debouncing: How showing workflows send signals to wake up subscription workflows, and how a 60-second in-workflow timer batches multiple theater alerts into a single digest—without consuming active CPU while sleeping. Serverless workers on Cloud Run : How running Temporal workers as serverless containers lets compute autoscale directly with task queue depth rather than generic CPU metrics. AI agents for ops: How modern coding agents paired with Terraform and the gcloud CLI accelerated the deployment and operational dashboard setup. The point that stuck with me is how durable execution fundamentally changes how you think about long-lived state and retries. Instead of building complex cron jobs, custom retry databases, and alert queues, the workflow state itself is the queue and the timer. Have you experimented with entity workflows or running workflow workers on serverless infrastructure? How do you handle debouncing and noisy downstream APIs in your own apps?

Originally published on nejckorasa.github.io . When a team moves from a monolith into microservices and event-driven, asynchronous systems, it inherits a class of problems that used to be someone else's: work that fails halfway through, steps that must not run twice, calls that return before the work is done. Temporal is a durable execution engine that handles a lot of this - you define a multi-step process, and it guarantees the process runs to completion even when workers crash in the middle. I've spent the better part of a decade building distributed systems in the money-movement core of banks - ledgers, payments, credit cards - a lot of it on Temporal, from short request-triggered workflows to ones that stayed open for weeks. This is the high-level guide I'd give a team making that jump: the principles worth internalising before you ship, not a full tutorial. Most of them aren't really about Temporal. They're the habits the async shift demands - Temporal just punishes you quickly when you skip one. Durable Execution: The Problem It Solves Distributed work fails in the middle. You call service A, it succeeds. You call B, it times out. The pod dies before C. Now you have half-finished work and no memory of how far you got. The usual fix is a pile of status columns, a cron job to find stuck rows, and retry logic hand-rolled for every step. Temporal's promise is that any process you start runs to the end. The runtime picture: there's a Temporal service (its own cluster), and your app runs worker processes that poll it and execute your code. As a workflow runs, Temporal records every step to an event history . If a worker dies, another picks the workflow up and replays that history to rebuild state, then carries on from where it left off, retrying anything that failed. The history is the source of truth, and it survives the crash. Most of the rules below fall out of that one fact. The Golden Rule: Workflows Decide, Activities Do There are two kinds of code in Tempora