[sewen]

afaik, with Temporal you deploy workers. When a workflow calls an activity, the activity gets added to a queue, and the workers pull activities from queues.

In Restate, there are no workers like that. The durable functions (which contain the equivalent of the activity logic) get deployed on FaaS or like a containerized RPC service. The Restate broker calls the function/service with the argument and some attached context (journal, state, ...).

You can think of it a bit like Kafka vs. EventBridge. The former needs long lived clients that poll for events, the latter pushes events to subscribers/listeners.

This "push" (Restate broker calls the service) means there doesn't have to be a long running process waiting for work (by polling a queue).

I think the difference also naturally from the programming abstraction: In Temporal, it is workflows that create activities, in Restate it stateful durable functions (bundled into services).