[radiospiel]

6 years ago we built a workflow engine similar to Temporal (which unfortunately is not open sourced), with the explicit goal to interweave as much of workflow async-ness into seemingly synchronous code. Engineers didn't need to write bespoke persistence, retry, wakeup, itempotency handling any longer, and we had seen great results, in term of dev productivity, while easily meeting the performance requirements for our workloads. On top of that we could easily trace the execution, scale up and down dynamically, assign a price to individual executions (and therefore customers).

Glad to see that Temporal follows a similar approach and gets you the same benefits. For every coder out there currently using AWS SWF: if your day work involves more than just handholding a handful workflows but building those, take a look at Temporal. You'll never look back.

(To be fair I am still grumpy that they still separate "deciders" and activitities, but I can see the benefits of that.)

If you want to use a GUI to design workflows: equally useful, but probably with a different target audience.