Instacart Simplifies Complex Workflows with Temporal

Instacart is an online grocery delivery service that connects customers with shoppers who purchase items from local stores. The company's platform team focuses on providing the tools and infrastructure necessary for other teams to build and maintain their applications. A key part of their role is ensuring that Instacart's internal teams can effectively utilize Temporal.

Complex Solutions Make for Complex Workflows#

Instacart faced significant challenges in managing complex workflows involving multiple interdependent steps. The complicated set of tools that they’d assembled, such as Airflow, cron jobs, and long-running RPCs, proved inadequate for handling the intricacies and reliability requirements of their business processes. Upon implementation, Instacart continued to run into the following issues.

• Difficulty Managing Complex Workflows: Managing numerous interconnected steps within a workflow was complex and time consuming.
• Difficulty in Integration: Integrating different components of a workflow was challenging, leading to issues in managing dependencies and overall process reliability.
• Lack of Visibility: Traditional methods offered limited visibility into workflow execution, making it difficult to troubleshoot and understand the process flow.
• Reliability Concerns: Existing tools struggled to ensure the reliability and consistency of workflow execution, especially in the face of failures or errors.

Using Temporal to Simplify Workflows#

Instacart leverages Temporal to streamline complex business workflows and enhance developer productivity. Temporal’s key advantages resonated with the platform team:

• Complex Workflow Orchestration: Temporal's ability to manage state, retries, and visibility makes it ideal for intricate processes like order fulfillment, which involves multiple interdependent steps.
• Developer Velocity: Temporal accelerates development cycles by abstracting away infrastructure concerns and providing robust testing capabilities.

Benefits of Temporal Adoption#

Temporal has impacted our success greatly because the less time we have to think about…how to do the things that Temporal does, the more time we can spend thinking about what kind of business logic we want.

• Increased Developer Productivity: Temporal empowers engineers to focus on core business logic by handling the complexities of workflow orchestration.
• Improved Decision Making: As Temporal expresses workflows as code, developers can leverage their existing skills and tools, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving.
• Scalability: Temporal's ability to handle high-scale operation has enabled Instacart to process over 10 million workloads per day.

Conclusion#

By adopting Temporal, Instacart has significantly improved its ability to build and manage intricate business processes, resulting in increased efficiency and scalability. Temporal’s focus on developer experience, coupled with its robust features, has made it a valuable asset in Instacart's technology stack.