The Challenge
Temporal makes it easy for developers to build resiliency into their applications. Developers have more time to code, without worrying about scalability and reliability. Engineering organizations gain agility, moving faster throughout the software development lifecycle. Temporal uses persistent workflows to ensure the successful execution of services and applications.
Ideally, developers should focus exclusively on business logic, leaving failure handling and persistence to an underlying architecture. Temporal is dedicated to making that a reality, handling failure and persistence. This approach frees developers to write application code while relying on Temporal expertise in durable execution.
This philosophy quickly raised a dilemma. As Temporal created pluggable adapters to databases like Cassandra, it became apparent that the company needed an operationalized solution for the persistence layer. To build it themselves would go against their own philosophy.
"We want to convince our customers to focus on their core value, so we have to do that as well," said Abbas.
The Solution
Faced with the decision to use a service or build one, Temporal chose to play to its strengths rather than run its own database. The company quickly settled on Cassandra as a data persistence option. Temporal found that Cassandra had solid scalability characteristics for users running mission-critical applications. However, running Cassandra required database expertise. After extensive evaluation of available technologies, Temporal chose DataStax Astra DB.
Built on Cassandra, Astra DB on AWS simplifies cloud-native Cassandra application development. Astra DB takes care of the operational burden often associated with using a powerhouse database like Cassandra, while reducing deployment time.
Temporal is write-intensive, which Cassandra excels at handling. With Astra DB, Temporal deployments handle a massive amount of data without sacrificing availability, scalability, or query performance. Developers can build scalable Temporal workflows in the cloud without worrying about the infrastructure.
Because customers develop mission-critical applications, Temporal does not take it lightly when it brings a new dependency into its fold. Because of that, partnership was another key reason Temporal chose Astra DB.
"We see a lot of similarities with DataStax in how we operate. Our experience working together has been amazing," said Abbas.
The Results
With Astra DB on AWS, Temporal supports developers with durable execution, reliability, and scalability, allowing them to code their application knowing it will scale. Persistence is vital to the overall experience, and essential to Temporal's success. The partnership between Temporal and DataStax is highly collaborative.
By choosing Astra DB for persistence, Temporal avoided a protracted development effort outside of its area of expertise. It operationalized Cassandra, making development faster for both Temporal and its customers. And developers have a high performance, resilient, and scalable environment for their mission-critical applications.
Together, Temporal and Astra DB enable customers to focus on their goals and what they do best. Abbas advises developers to figure out the key requirements and guarantees they need, and then build their value-add applications on top of technology that provides that functionality.
That's exactly what Abbas did when looking for a persistence solution. "We would not be where we are today without Astra DB," said Abbas.
