Platform engineering teams are the force multipliers behind scalable infrastructure and streamlined developer experiences. Their mission? Build the internal platforms that let product engineers ship faster without sacrificing reliability or operational efficiency.
These days, apps are complex, spread out, and always crashing. Managing that complexity while providing reliable golden paths is no easy feat.
That’s where Temporal comes in. Temporal fortifies platform teams. With Temporal, your team can manage operations as fault-tolerant, reliable workflows.
In this post, we’ll explore five real use cases where Temporal helps teams just like yours move from fragile scripts and makeshift processes to scalable infrastructure automation that’s reliable. Always.
1. Incident response and runbook automation#
For platform teams, responding to incidents often relies on playbooks or inherent knowledge within an organization. Actions like restarting services, collecting logs, starting or stopping an operation within a Kubernetes cluster can be difficult to implement. Even if your team is using standalone tools or APIs to manage these actions, they often require oversight to ensure proper execution.
How Temporal helps:#
Temporal Workflows encode incident response logic as code:
- Workflows can restart services, send alerts, or collect system data immediately when an incident occurs. These actions happen without manual intervention, reducing delays.
- Some responses require human input, such as an approval or verification. Temporal lets Workflows pause and wait for those inputs before continuing.
- Workflows can remain idle for hours or days until the next step is ready to run, allowing handoffs between teams or regions without losing progress.
- All automated and manual steps are recorded in the Workflow history. This provides a clear record for audits and post-incident analysis.
Datadog, for example, used Temporal to move their manual workbooks over to automated and highly available workflows for large migration operations and versioning. By turning runbooks into executable Workflows, they were able to gain consistency, speed, and insight during incidents.
2. Certificate rotation#
Expired TLS certificates and stale credentials can silently disrupt critical services and introduce significant security vulnerabilities. Normally, certification rotation is handled through cron jobs or ephemeral scripts, which operate silently in the background.
These approaches are brittle: they can fail silently without triggering alerts, leaving administrators unaware of issues until service outages or security incidents occur. It’s also tricky to track these operations throughout the rotation process and ensure visibility into their completion.
How Temporal helps:#
Temporal enables fault-tolerant Workflows that can help with certificate rotation in the following ways:
- Certificate rotation process is done through resilient and stateful Workflows, surviving crashes and restarts with persistent state throughout.
- Automated exponential backoff, retries, and long-running workflows (whether they run for less than a second or many years) ensure reliable, timely certificate renewal and propagation.
- A visual UI offers real-time insight into certificate rotation progress, failures, and audit history.
- Orchestration lives in Workflows, while rotation logic — like calling certificate authorities or updating secrets — runs in Workers for clarity and maintainability.
Temporal Cloud supports certificate rotation with mTLS and API keys, and even provides guidance on how to do so. This approach provides platform teams with resilience, compliance visibility, and assurance that sensitive credentials are never left unmanaged.
3. Infrastructure management#
One of the most common challenges in infrastructure management is ensuring reliability across a complex ecosystem of components, each with its own potential points of failure. Whether it's hardware availability, network disruptions or service misconfigurations, platform teams must ensure that multi-step processes complete successfully even when issues arise. Otherwise, your infrastructure can end up in an inconsistent state with orphaned resources.
With Temporal, teams can build long-running, fault-tolerant workflows that guarantee each step executes reliably and consistently — regardless of underlying failures.
How Temporal helps:#
Temporal can support infrastructure management in a few different ways:
- Automate the entire resource lifecycle by orchestrating provisioning, monitoring, updates, and teardown through resilient workflows that handle retries, timeouts, and state tracking — all without manual intervention.
- If something fails, Temporal automatically retries. During that time, you can go and fix the issue without losing all the Workflow’s progress, and when you’re done the Workflow will complete.
- Teams can observe exactly where a resource is in its lifecycle with live status and history.
Temporal’s powerful platform can be adapted as a powerful engine for managing the full lifecycle of infrastructure with built-in reliability, traceability and safety.
4. CI/CD pipeline orchestration#
CI/CD pipelines often span multiple stages — unit tests, integration checks, approvals, canary deploys, metrics validation, and rollback conditions. Given the number of required steps, conventional tools can potentially fail hours into a job, resulting in the whole process needing to be started from scratch. Platform teams are often responsible for managing fast delivery without sacrificing reliability.
How Temporal helps:#
Temporal allows teams to:
- Build CI/CD functions as stateful workflows with branching logic, retries, and pause-resume control, and dynamic rollback that resumes from the failure point instead of starting over
- Release gates, canary deployments, and automated long-haul tests (e.g., 72-hour runs) can be managed as part of a CI/CD workflow, with customizable branching logic and dynamic pausing or halting when issues are detected
- Every action taken in a pipeline — build, test, deploy, rollback — is logged and visible through Temporal’s history, supporting postmortems and compliance requirements.
Netflix re-platformed Spinnaker to use Temporal as the backend for orchestrating continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Temporal executes and tracks multi-step deployment workflows, ensuring resilience, state management, and reliable execution even if failures occur during a deployment. These features have provided Netflix with resilient, traceable software delivery.
5. Internal Developer Platform (IDP) automation#
Operating in a cloud-native, microservice-based environment often adds difficulty, and teams must manage failures, data durability, and distributed consistency. As such, platform teams want to provide their developers with “golden paths” that shield them from complexity while also providing context.
Temporal allows platform teams to use built-in primitives such as Workflows, Activities, Callers, and more to define specific actions that developers can take within their environments.
How Temporal helps:#
Temporal Workflows can form the backbone of IDP automation by doing the following:
- Encapsulate complex tasks such as provisioning, CI/CD, or infrastructure management behind simple workflow triggers. Developers don’t need to know the APIs, approval chains, or operational details.
- Coordinate across multiple systems (e.g., GitHub, Terraform, Vault, DNS) to deliver end-to-end workflows.
- Enable secure delegation with built-in role-based access control, namespace isolation, and API key management, allowing teams to self-serve operations within safe boundaries.
- Integrate manual approvals or signals where needed, for example, for security or cost validation.
- Provide a consistent, observable, and retryable developer experience, making platform workflows dependable and transparent.
Companies like Humana leverage Temporal as an abstraction layer that simplifies the development of resilient cloud applications. Now, their engineers can focus on business logic rather than navigating infrastructure complexity, and spend their time accelerating the delivery of their cloud-native applications.
How you can get started#
From automating incident response and securing certificate management to managing infrastructure, orchestrating CI/CD pipelines, and enabling golden paths through IDP automation, Temporal inspires platform engineering teams to tame complexity head-on. By turning operations into resilient, stateful workflows, Temporal gives teams the tools to build scalable, developer-friendly platforms.
Ready to see how Temporal can elevate your platform engineering strategy?
- Talk to an expert about your platform challenges
- Connect on the Temporal Community Slack
- Sign up for Temporal Cloud and get $1,000 in free credits to explore what Temporal can do for your team