This presentation will discuss our experience and design decisions in building an approval system on top of Temporal which involves a long-running business process with synchronous human interactions.

We chose Temporal for the high flexibility, and convenient failure handling, but the integration presented challenges. We want to share the problems and solutions so that others can benefit from Temporal in similar use cases easily. The talk will highlight how we replaced a traditional database with a Temporal Workflow as the source of truth. Furthermore, it will explain the challenges of coordinating activities, signals, and queries in synchronous requests involving human interaction, how we navigated these challenges, and how we will benefit from Temporal’s new synchronous update feature.