[troebr]

I found out about Temporal 2+y ago now and were early adopters of their cloud. It's a bit of a paradigm shift when you start using it, but it is amazing at solving some types of problems in a very simple manner. There are some trade-offs, there always are, for us that was migrating long lived workflows. But the resulting simplicity and maintainability of the code has been great. One thing that was hard with Temporal was to "sell it" to business leaders because it's not a turn key solution, it's more like a piece of infra for engineers to build on top of. Kind of a higher level database-queue-workflow engine thing that simplifies work for engineers.

In short we were working on automating things like onboarding a new employee, which involves creating accounts for their saas apps, buying and shipping their device, email confirmations, satisfactions surveys etc. So a workflow could last up to 3 months with some fully automated systems, and some that required integrating with people (listening to jira event to trigger things, etc).

The error handling was the thing that sold me on Temporal, because things can break just about anywhere in unpredictable ways (not just code, can be process, employee quits during the onboarding, customer is out of licenses etc), so we need everything to be robust and be fixable by a person. With homegrown queue based systems or with BPEL it can be hard handling these situations (what if you need to roll back 3 steps?). With code you can use exceptions, write unit tests etc. We use the typescript sdk, promises made it very intuitive to code even some otherwise complicated scenarios (say event listeners etc).