System Design: A Breakdown of Temporal’s Internal Architecture by Sanil Khurana | Data Science Collective

For the past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into Temporal. It’s a really interesting tool that makes it extremely simple to write complex workflows. Over time, as I wrote workflows, changed configurations, and monitored metrics, I came to understand how incredibly complex its internal architecture is. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of great technical documentation to understand its architecture anywhere on the internet. So I decided to dive deep into Temporal on my own, with whatever information I could find and figure out the gaps from directly reading the source code. After a long and arduous journey of tens or hundreds of files of source code and thousands of lines of code, I think I have got a firm grasp on Temporal’s architecture, so here is my attempt at explaining it all to you. It's impossible to understand the entirety of its architecture by just creating a huge diagram and copy-pasting it here, so I’ll walk through step-by-step, peeling the layers of its complexity one by

For the past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into Temporal. It’s a really interesting tool that makes it extremely simple to write complex workflows. Over time, as I wrote workflows, changed configurations, and monitored metrics, I came to understand how incredibly complex its internal architecture is. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of great technical documentation to understand its architecture anywhere on the internet. So I decided to dive deep into Temporal on my own, with whatever information I could find and figure out the gaps from directly reading the source code. After a long and ar