Design durable workflows with Temporal for distributed systems. Covers workflow vs activity separation, saga patterns, state management, and determinism constraints. Use when building long-running processes, distributed transactions, or microservice orchestration.

Workflow Orchestration Patterns Master workflow orchestration architecture with Temporal, covering fundamental design decisions, resilience patterns, and best practices for building reliable distributed systems. When to Use Workflow Orchestration Ideal Use Cases (Source: docs.temporal.io) Multi step processes spanning machines/services/databases Distributed transactions requiring all or nothing semantics Long running workflows (hours to years) with automatic state persistence Failure recovery that must resume from last successful step Business processes : bookings, orders, campaigns, approvals Entity lifecycle management : inventory tracking, account management, cart workflows Infrastructure automation : CI/CD pipelines, provisioning, deployments Human in the loop systems requiring timeouts and escalations When NOT to Use Simple CRUD operations (use direct API calls) Pure data processing pipelines (use Airflow, batch processing) Stateless request/response (use standard APIs) Real time streaming (use Kafka, event processors) Detailed patterns and worked examples Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md . Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient. Best Practices Workflow Design 1. Keep workflows focused Single responsibility per workflow 2. Small workflows Use child workflows for scalability 3. Clear boundaries Workflow orchestrates, activities execute 4. Test locally Use time skipping test environment Activity Design 1. Idempotent operations Safe to retry 2. Short lived Seconds to minutes, not hours 3. Timeout configuration Always set timeouts 4. Heartbeat for long tasks Report progress 5. Error handling Distinguish retryable vs non retryable Common Pitfalls Workflow Violations : Using datetime.now() instead of workflow.now() Threading or async operations in workflow code Calling external APIs directly from workflow Non deterministic logic in workflows Activity Mistakes : Non idempotent operations (can't handle retries) Missing timeouts (activities run forever) No error classification (retry validation errors) Ignoring payload limits (2MB per argument) Operational Considerations Monitoring : Workflow execution duration Activity failure rates Retry attempts and backoff Pending workflow counts Scalability : Horizontal scaling with workers Task queue partitioning Child workflow decomposition Activity batching when appropriate Additional Resources Official Documentation : Temporal Core Concepts: docs.temporal.io/workflows Workflow Patterns: docs.temporal.io/evaluate/use cases design patterns Best Practices: docs.temporal.io/develop/best practices Saga Pattern: temporal.io/blog/saga pattern made easy Key Principles : 1. Workflows = orchestration, Activities = external calls 2. Determinism is non negotiable for workflows 3. Idempotency is critical for activities 4. State preservation is automatic 5. Design for failure and recovery

workflow-orchestration-patterns