Attentive migrates to Temporal Cloud for infrastructure cost savings and increased application reliability

Temporal’s open-source platform for flexibility in designing workflows

Attentive is a data-backed marketing platform that identifies a brand’s customers across devices and builds robust profiles by capturing behavioral signals in real time to reveal individual intent, timing, and preferences. Attentive sets itself apart because it delivers omnichannel marketing experiences that are genuinely personal.

Their journey Temporal began years ago. Originally, their stack included a distributed system called the Automation Engine (which still exists today). The Automation Engine solved a specific need at the time: processing Journey workflows (Journey is a specific product at Attentive). Other teams at Attentive wanted to write their own workflows for their domains and have the Automation Engine process them, but the system wasn’t flexible enough to handle diverse use cases. Moreover, the Automation Engine uses a domain-specific language (DSL) that anyone looking to adopt would have to learn. The DSL is highly specific to the Journey product, making it difficult for other teams to adopt it for workflow use cases.

To address the growing need for management of complex workflows across the organization, the team researched practical alternatives and quickly considered Temporal as a technology to pursue to solve this, especially given its open-source posture. Additionally, Attentive saw value in being able to write workflows as code and not having to conform to a DSL, which allows them the flexibility to design workflows in different shapes and manners and not be constrained by the myriad of different use cases we could adopt in the future.

Temporal’s usage across the organization exploded, with teams starting to either migrate or build more of their use cases on top of the platform.

Examples of use cases include:

• Data sync Workflows: Temporal powers Attentive’s bidirectional data sync Workflows, easily orchestrating updates and event ingestion both from external platforms into Attentive and from Attentive out to partner systems. By reliably managing retries, error handling, and scalability, Temporal keeps data flowing smoothly — even across high-volume, complex integrations. Temporal also provides rich observability and visibility into Workflow execution with built-in logging and metrics, making it easy to monitor sync health, trace activity history, and debug failures.
• Campaigns: Sending a campaign at Attentive involves coordinating many steps — some running in parallel, others dependent on prior results. Temporal handles this orchestration flawlessly, giving teams full visibility into each request, including step durations and the inputs and outputs for every stage. This transparency makes debugging straightforward when issues arise. With well-defined retry policies, Attentive engineers no longer need to manage retries manually!
• Automated audiences: When marketers build campaigns with Attentive's AI Pro, Temporal orchestrates the creation of Automated Audiences — ensuring each campaign reaches its optimized, AI-enhanced segment. By reliably coordinating audience enrichment, Temporal helps maximize campaign reach and effectiveness. Without this automation, campaigns may default to base audiences, limiting their potential impact and missing valuable conversion opportunities.
• Product recommendations and affinity: Attentive uses Temporal to power personalized product recommendations and product affinity scoring. Temporal orchestrates complex workflows to calculate purchase propensity and product similarity scores for users and product subsets. These insights enable marketers to optimize campaign audiences by identifying users most likely to engage with a product based on their individual affinity and likelihood to buy. Temporal’s reliability and scalability ensure these calculations remain accurate, timely, and ready to drive targeted, high-impact campaigns.

While the value of the Temporal platform was proven across the engineering organization, Attentive started to run into increasing costs and operational burden (eight engineering-months last year on Temporal maintenance alone!) to self host the open sourced Temporal Server.

Scale performance issues making Temporal Cloud a no brainer

Some quick context setting — Temporal is an open source platform that allows developers to write workflow logic using one of Temporal’s 7 SDKs. These SDKs communicate with a backend service that we call the Temporal Server that brings all of the orchestration magic of executing distributed Workflows and providing a fault-tolerant, scalable, and stateful backend for running long-lived, reliable Workflows. All of this is available open source.

However, as Attentive’s use of Temporal was scaling exponentially, maintaining the Temporal Server became extremely difficult, time consuming, and costly for the organization.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) of self hosting the Temporal Server captures costs across Infra, Operational, and Technical Investments needed. And can grow exponentially as you layer on more use cases and usage of the platform.

Jessica Lennick, a software engineer at Attentive, remembers Cyber Monday of 2024 as an inflection point for when the team realized they needed to migrate to Temporal Cloud.

“We had known for a while that self hosting [the Temporal Server] wasn’t going to work for us long term. And then Black Friday / Cyber Monday happened. It was very stressful with hundreds or thousands of developer hours thrown at the problem.”

Additionally, the Attentive Eng team ran into several technical challenges with self-hosting. Two notably were:

• The team originally used a sharded mysql solution as the persistence store. There were compatibility issues with schema updates that introduced major risk to future version upgrades.
• The team faced scalability concerns given the cluster setting. Horizontally or vertically scaling the cluster did not mitigate the issue. And the team realized that they may need to explore a different persistence store to mitigate the issue.

Enter, Temporal Cloud. Temporal Cloud is the fully managed version of the backend Temporal Server that eliminates the need for teams to operate their own Workflow orchestration infrastructure. The application code is still written in your own environment using our open-sourced SDKs, but now communicates with the Temporal Cloud backend for massive scale, reliability and security, without the operational overhead.

Attentive’s engineering management team was sold: Temporal Cloud would allow Attentive to reliably scale up its operations and use of Temporal.

Given the total cost of ownership (TCO) that was calculated to self-host Temporal, Attentive recognizes significant cost savings on their monthly engineering bills net the consumption spend on Temporal Cloud.

Increased reliability, reducing operational overhead and costs, and saving developers time made migrating to Temporal Cloud a no-brainer for Attentive Engineering leadership.

Painless migration to Temporal Cloud using Temporal’s migration service

In the spring of 2025, Temporal announced the pre-release of new migration tooling that allows organizations to migrate their self hosted instances to Temporal Cloud effortlessly, promising zero downtime and minimal effort or code needed from customers.

Attentive was interested in the tooling primarily to save engineering time and avoid migrating schedules manually or building some type of programmatic migration process in house. Additionally, they were interested in being able to migrate workflows without the possibility of data loss.

“We knew we wanted to migrate to Temporal Cloud. But reliability was extremely important to our teams. Temporal’s migration tooling offered us a low effort way to migrate, with the confidence that no data or workflows would be corrupted or lost along the way.”

The Attentive team partnered with Temporal to migrate their namespaces team-by-team, starting from their lower dev environments, then staging, then their production namespaces. At every step, Temporal and the Attentive team validated things were migrating smoothly as expected. Using the Temporal migration tooling, the Attentive team couldo do a live migration, synchronizing their namespaces with Temporal Cloud, and doing a completely zero-downtime migration without complex juggling or turning off old namespaces and switching workloads over to new namespaces.

This process let the Attentive team migrate each set of namespaces simply, with minimal risk, and build confidence as they went along.

Given that the Temporal migration service is in pre-release, Temporal engineers were heavily involved in making sure the process went smoothly for Attentive.

“I’ve had some particularly painful experiences with hosting the Temporal Server, so I was excited to move to Cloud and get that off my hands. And you [Temporal] and the team were wonderful partners to us that made that all go smoothly.”

$30,000/month cost savings from enhanced observability after switching to Temporal Cloud

Looking ahead, Attentive is excited to scale with Temporal Cloud as a core part of its infrastructure strategy. By migrating off their self-hosted Temporal server to Temporal Cloud, the team was able to capture an estimated $30,000/month in cost savings.

Temporal Cloud gave Attentive the chance to audit workflows and surface issues where there were hundreds of thousands of long running workflows that were executing for an inactive company. Because of Temporal Cloud’s observability features, they were able to identify the workflows and terminate them.

Interested in the migration service from Temporal? Learn more here in this article.

To learn more about Attentive or request a demo, visit www.attentive.com.