The Future of Friction-Free Workflow Upgrades

Abstract#

Today, iterating on workflow implementations requires careful, backwards-compatible patching that, if done incorrectly, can result in stuck workflows and challenging remediations. Together, Temporal and Datadog are working to improve this process.

Temporal is developing APIs that allow teams to manage their deploys of Temporal Workers. With these APIs, short-running workflows will be guaranteed to run to completion on a single version of code with no patching, and developers will have better and safer tools to migrate even long-running workflows to new versions.

As a design partner, Datadog has been building an open-source Kubernetes controller based on these APIs. This controller will manage the rollouts of worker deployments and automatically reconcile running workflows with existing worker versions. In this session, you will learn about the future of safely managing worker rollouts, see a demo of the worker Kubernetes controller, and join a community of developers creating new best practices for deploying stateful applications.

About the Presenters#

Jacob LeGrone is a Staff Software Engineer at Datadog where he has spent the last five years helping engineering teams design, test and deploy distributed systems. Jacob has a long history of work in the open source community; most recently as an active contributor to Temporal projects including Temporalite and the SQLite storage driver, as a Helm maintainer where he focused on deployment hooks and end to end testing, and as one of the co-authors of the Cloud Native Application Bundles specification.

Drew Hoskins is a Staff Product Manager at Temporal focusing on improving the experience of Temporal application developers. He’s spent his whole career building developer technology, most recently as a Staff Engineer at Stripe where he founded and built out the Workflow Engine, a popular framework for Stripe engineers built on Temporal. You can follow his writings on software engineering at https://drewhoskins.substack.com/