Workflow Orchestration Patterns
Master workflow orchestration architecture with Temporal, covering fundamental design decisions, resilience patterns, and best practices for building reliable distributed systems.
When to Use Workflow Orchestration
Ideal Use Cases (Source: docs.temporal.io)
- Multi-step processes spanning machines/services/databases
- Distributed transactions requiring all-or-nothing semantics
- Long-running workflows (hours to years) with automatic state persistence
- Failure recovery that must resume from last successful step
- Business processes: bookings, orders, campaigns, approvals
- Entity lifecycle management: inventory tracking, account management, cart workflows
- Infrastructure automation: CI/CD pipelines, provisioning, deployments
- Human-in-the-loop systems requiring timeouts and escalations
When NOT to Use
- Simple CRUD operations (use direct API calls)
- Pure data processing pipelines (use Airflow, batch processing)
- Stateless request/response (use standard APIs)
- Real-time streaming (use Kafka, event processors)
Detailed patterns and worked examples
Detailed pattern documentation lives in . Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.