Today was the first day of Replay 2024, Temporal’s annual conference. In case you couldn't make it, I've compiled the day's top highlights and key takeaways.
Keynote Session
Samar Abbas, Co-Founder and CEO of Temporal, opened the keynote by asking, "How many of these issues are due to non-durable execution?" It followed with a live demo where participants played a game built using Temporal Workflows. This interactive demo highlighted Temporal’s ability to ensure Workflows survive in challenging conditions.
Next, Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder and CTO, discussed key challenges of distributed systems, and how Temporal, with over 20 years of research and eight years in production, is a trusted solution. Maxim also introduced Nexus, a new feature enabling Workflows to be triggered across Namespaces, which helps simplify system architecture.
Samar returned to announce key updates: Workflow Update, Worker Auto-Tuning, and Worker Scaling—all designed to improve user experience and reduce Worker management costs.
Preeti Somal, SVP of Engineering, highlighted Temporal Cloud’s growth and unveiled a few key announcements: a $1,000 promotion credit, API Keys, Google Cloud as the second cloud provider supported by Temporal Cloud (with Azure coming soon), and a Billing Center. She stressed that Temporal Cloud offers robust security, giving users full control over their environments.
Finally, the session closed with a call to action: "Unblock your creativity with Temporal!"
Highlights from Additional Sessions
There were a wide variety of sessions, presented by customers, partners, and Temporal employees. We will be publishing all the recordings following Replay, but in the meantime, here are top highlights from a few additional sessions I attended.
Great tech is not enough - building trust to get the most out of Temporal By Cashback App This session highlighted strategies to expand Temporal usage by building an internal platform team. Key steps include collaborating with other teams through design reviews and pair programming, and simplifying Temporal with a custom Workflow SDK that meets most internal needs. Flexibility is important, as Temporal platform teams can operate differently from traditional ones. Celebrating the success of teams using Temporal and quantifying the impact, like reduced development time, are essential to promoting wider adoption.
Mastering Self-Hosted Temporal Clusters By Salesforce The talk focused on managing high availability, scalability, and cost efficiency in self-hosted Temporal clusters. It discussed setting up multi-availability zones, handling unexpected pod disruptions, and addressing certificate expiration to ensure system reliability. On the scalability front, strategies included scaling based on application load, using Aurora for persistent storage, and setting per-Namespace resource limits for multi-tenant clusters, alongside enhanced monitoring and alerting. The session also emphasized the importance of controlling costs by optimizing resource utilization—particularly compute, storage, and archival—while staying within budget.
Temporal Product Feedback | Managing Temporal Cloud Costs: Finance, Visibility Jonathan Lacefield, Temporal Staff Product Manager, took the stage to announce the release of a new feature: the Billing Center. He demonstrated the updated billing platform and introduced the new roles that could be able to access the Billing Center. Additionally, usage APIs will soon be available, allowing users to query and retrieve detailed billing information. Temporal is actively seeking feedback from users on their cost management needs, including the level of granularity they require for cost insights.
Get Ready for Day 2
Day 2 of Replay 2024 tomorrow promises to be just as engaging and enlightening. Stay tuned for tomorrow's recap.