Software engineering isn’t just about solving technical challenges — it’s about removing ones that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Few understand this better than Max Fateev and Samar Abbas, co-founders of Temporal. Their experiences span some of the most influential tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber, shaping their vision of what workflow orchestration should be. They’ve seen firsthand how orchestration can either empower developers or drag them down. Their careers have shaped a daring vision: letting developers write clean business logic without worrying about failure recovery, state, or time.
Amazon and the Birth of Orchestration
In 2002, Max, now CTO of Temporal, joined Amazon amid a pivotal transition from monolithic applications to a service-oriented architecture (now known as microservices). At that time, the entire Amazon website ran as a single binary — a massive Apache module taking an excruciating 45 minutes to link after each minor code change. This inefficiency sparked Amazon’s transition into service-oriented architectures.
Max’s team developed Amazon’s foundational pub/sub architecture, ultimately evolving into Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS). During this period, Max realized queues alone weren’t sufficient for reliable communication between distributed services. This insight prompted him to lead development on Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service (SWF), an innovative orchestration tool designed to bring order to asynchronous communication.
However, SWF struggled with widespread adoption, largely due to its challenging developer experience. Although conceptually advanced, developers found it complex and cumbersome, highlighting an essential lesson: powerful technology must also be accessible.
Samar Abbas and Azure’s Durable Task Framework
Samar, CEO of Temporal, who had worked alongside Max at Amazon, carried these lessons to Microsoft. At Azure, Samar faced internal competition — Azure already offered multiple orchestration services. Nevertheless, Samar built the open-source Durable Task Framework, driven by a belief in simplifying orchestration for developers. Durable Task Framework is an orchestration library simplifying the creation and management of long-running, stateful workflows. It gained grassroots traction within Microsoft and Azure’s developer community, eventually becoming a key dependency for Azure Functions.
Uber and the Open-Source Era With Cadence
Max and Samar reunited at Uber, creating Cadence — an orchestration framework designed from the outset as fully open source. This decision was critical: Max observed firsthand at Amazon how powerful technologies stagnated if kept proprietary. Uber’s openness fostered broader adoption, innovation, and community-driven improvement.
Cadence aimed squarely at solving distributed workflow challenges. However, Max and Samar again realized they could do better by enhancing the developer experience and simplifying fault tolerance even further.
Temporal: Durable Execution and Redefining Orchestration
Temporal was born as a direct answer to the challenges Max and Samar encountered at Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber. At its core lies the concept of “Durable Execution,” a groundbreaking abstraction that automatically preserves the full state of a Workflow — even across failures, crashes, or data center outages.
Max emphasizes the radical simplicity Temporal brings to developers: “You practically end up writing pure business logic without thinking about other things — no event handlers, callbacks, or explicit database interactions. For a financial Workflow, it’s as simple as writing: withdraw, deposit, and if something goes wrong, automatically compensate.”
This might sound “too good to be true,” a common reaction Max notes when first explaining Temporal. Yet, real-world results at mission-critical enterprises, including major financial institutions, confirm Temporal’s promise. It substantially reduces code complexity, increases fault tolerance, and boosts developer productivity — often cutting the necessary code by a factor of five.
Why Banks and FinServ Companies Are Choosing Temporal
Financial services rely heavily on resilience, precision, and guaranteed transactions — exactly where Temporal excels. Banks, Max notes, typically manage long, complex workflows involving manual approvals, numerous API calls, and critical compensations. Temporal makes managing such complex scenarios straightforward, with built-in resiliency and guaranteed outcomes.
For instance, an Australian bank, ANZ, fully automated its electronic mortgage process using Temporal. Payments, approvals, and compensations — which previously required extensive code — are now simple, reliable Workflows.
Security by Design
Addressing concerns around open-source security, Max emphasizes Temporal’s secure-by-design approach. Temporal separates its backend orchestration cluster from user applications. Users retain full control, encrypting their data client-side. Even if the orchestration backend were compromised, sensitive data remains inaccessible.
A competitive Advantage, Built on Openness
Unlike open-core solutions, Temporal is fully open-source under an MIT license. Max highlights this strategic choice: “We believe the best way to ensure our technology’s longevity and constant improvement is complete openness. If customers ever doubt us, they can always run Temporal themselves.” Temporal also offers a cloud-hosted service, managing backend infrastructure while developers maintain complete control over their applications and data.
Max and Samar’s journey through Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber was about continually refining how developers interact with technology. Temporal represents a culmination of these lessons, offering an orchestration tool where developers can finally focus exclusively on business logic, confident that their Workflows are resilient by design.
See for yourself — get started with Temporal Cloud today and claim $1000 in free credits.