| This is a guest post from our friends at Grepsr, a leading web data extraction platform that processes over 600 million records daily. In this post, the Grepsr team shares their journey of adopting Temporal to orchestrate their complex data workflows at scale, achieving 99% delivery reliability while significantly improving their engineering efficiency. |
The digital economy thrives on data. To gain a competitive edge, businesses require a continuous influx of fresh, structured data from diverse web sources, enabling insights into everything from real-time market trends to competitive pricing strategies. However, reliably extracting this data at scale and transforming it into a usable format presents a significant challenge.
This is precisely where Grepsr excels.
Grepsr empowers companies to collect, structure, and deliver web data from thousands of sources, automating the entire data lifecycle. Our platform is leveraged by businesses across various sectors, including e-commerce, AI/ML, real estate, travel, and retail, to fuel more intelligent decision-making.
The maturity of data extraction / web scraping industry#
Web data extraction or “web scraping” has transitioned from a niche technical task — once managed by engineers using custom scripts and cron jobs — into a mission-critical function and a thriving industry. Today, it encompasses a sophisticated ecosystem of platforms, tools, APIs, and specialized service providers.
Businesses increasingly depend on external data for a multitude of strategic purposes.
At Grepsr, we've witnessed this escalating demand firsthand. We currently process over 600 million records daily from more than 10,000 sources, serving hundreds of customers through both a self-serve platform and comprehensive fully managed services. However, managing this immense scale and ensuring reliability extends beyond crawlers; it demands robust orchestration — and that’s where Temporal plays a pivotal role in our operations.
The challenge: Scaling without sacrificing reliability#
At the heart of Grepsr is a microservices-based, event-driven architecture. Each component — from crawling to data delivery — operates independently. In our early stages, these services were interconnected using a combination of cron jobs, bespoke scripts, and message queues.
However, as the complexity of our data extraction workflows rapidly increased, we encountered three significant and recurring challenges:
- Failures were hard to trace: When a component failed, it often required deep log dives to understand what went wrong.
- Workflow state was lost: If a job crashed halfway through, we had to restart the entire process from scratch.
- Parallel execution was brittle: Running multiple jobs concurrently led to inconsistencies without proper orchestration.
- Cron jobs lacked visibility: Scheduling was done via cron, with no built-in monitoring, history, or retry logic.
To meet growing demand while maintaining quality, we needed stronger orchestration, reliability, and observability.
Enter Temporal: A game-changer in resilience & visibility#
After evaluating several options, we chose Temporal to orchestrate our workflows. The decision came down to a few key factors:
- Code-first Workflows: Engineers write Workflows as regular code using Temporal SDKs, improving velocity and reducing custom orchestration logic.
- Built-in fault tolerance: Temporal maintains Workflow state even during failures, allowing us to resume processing from where it left off.
- Native parallelism: Handling thousands of concurrent workflows is straightforward with Temporal, helping us scale with demand.
- Observability: With Temporal’s Web UI and Event History, our teams can debug, monitor, and track every data job from start to finish.
Business impact: Reliability meets scale#
Temporal has become a critical part of Grepsr’s backend infrastructure — and the impact is tangible:
- 99% delivery reliability, even with distributed failures
- 60% reduction in incident resolution time, thanks to complete observability
- Faster time to market, as new Workflows can be built and deployed quickly
- Higher throughput, with confident parallel execution across services
Temporal has also provided unexpected but important benefits for team management. By encapsulating logic and behavior within well-defined Workflows, Temporal has helped Grepsr manage team transitions and turnover safely. New engineers can onboard faster, understand the system through declarative Workflows, and make changes without breaking critical processes.
Perhaps more importantly, Temporal has created a shared language across the organization. Today, everyone from engineers and testers to project managers speaks in terms of Workflows — making collaboration, planning, and debugging significantly more efficient.
Our engineers no longer have to worry about orchestrating retries or tracking job state. They focus on what matters — building better data experiences for our customers.
Final thoughts#
Grepsr’s mission is to simplify access to web data — and Temporal helps us deliver on that promise at scale. With robust orchestration, resilient Workflows, and complete visibility, we’re not only building a more reliable system — we’re building a better customer experience, and a more collaborative, resilient engineering culture.