lots of answers already here, just throwing in mine :)
Temporal is a workflow engine for managing distributed state. It abstracts away queues, databases, schedulers, state machines, load balancers/gateways and makes it so you don't have to be a distributed systems expert to get this right.
To me there are four levels of appeal:
1. standardized, declarative system for timeouts and retries <-- most users start here
2. event sourced, highly fault tolerant internal architecture ---> we even like the term "fault oblivious" - when you write workflow code you can assume that it is robust to downtime in external APIs, or Temporal Server or Temporal Workers, the thing just keeps going until it hits a timeout or an actual application failure!
3. idiomatic SDKs for "workflows as code" -> no need to learn some JSON or YML based DSL, use all familiar software tooling
4. horizontally scalable architecture for every part of the system (key differentiator vs handrolled systems... although i'm not saying you should prematurely scale of course, just saying this architecture lets you scale without replatforming)
Some projects that we get compared to (although of course we're not 1:1 competitors): Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions, Argo Workflows, Sidekiq, BullMQ
Temporal is a workflow engine for managing distributed state. It abstracts away queues, databases, schedulers, state machines, load balancers/gateways and makes it so you don't have to be a distributed systems expert to get this right.
To me there are four levels of appeal:
1. standardized, declarative system for timeouts and retries <-- most users start here
2. event sourced, highly fault tolerant internal architecture ---> we even like the term "fault oblivious" - when you write workflow code you can assume that it is robust to downtime in external APIs, or Temporal Server or Temporal Workers, the thing just keeps going until it hits a timeout or an actual application failure!
3. idiomatic SDKs for "workflows as code" -> no need to learn some JSON or YML based DSL, use all familiar software tooling
4. horizontally scalable architecture for every part of the system (key differentiator vs handrolled systems... although i'm not saying you should prematurely scale of course, just saying this architecture lets you scale without replatforming)
Some projects that we get compared to (although of course we're not 1:1 competitors): Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions, Argo Workflows, Sidekiq, BullMQ
My 7 min intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQhUL5RogXI
Architecture principles (23mins) https://docs.temporal.io/blog/workflow-engine-principles
Full blogpost: https://www.swyx.io/why-temporal/