Exploring Durable Execution on Serverless Platforms

Businesses are looking to build apps on Serverless cloud platforms to get the benefits of elastic scale, micro billing, and scale-to-zero. However, even with Temporal Cloud, it's not yet possible for durable apps to be 100% serverless. Or is it?

This talk explores how this could be achieved. We'll start by looking at the architecture of Azure Durable Functions, which shares the same lineage as Temporal. In particular, we'll explore how the extensibility of the Azure Functions runtime was exploited to enable durable execution and elastic scale on top of ephemeral compute with scale-to-zero support. We'll then show a prototype of running Temporal workflows on Azure's serverless compute platforms in conjunction with Temporal Cloud and walk through how this was accomplished. After this talk, attendees should have a better understanding of whether or how they can build Temporal Cloud apps today on Serverless platforms, and how it might be achieved to an even greater degree tomorrow.