Durable Execution for Control Planes: Building Temporal Cloud on Temporal

QCon San Francisco 2023

Session Architecture

Durable Execution for Control Planes: Building Temporal Cloud on Temporal

Wednesday Oct 4 / 01:35PM PDT, Ballroom BC

Abstract

A great SAAS service requires a robust Control Plane as its brain. The Control Plane automates infrastructure provisioning, deployments, configuration, monitoring, fleet management, capacity allocation to customers,  and so forth. Building a control plane is daunting and error prone. There are myriad long lived API calls on shared resources, and they occasionally fail. Reliable orchestration of these APIs is a crucial part of a healthy control plane.  In this talk, we introduce the concept of Durable Execution, with a real world example of how we use it to build the Control Plane for Temporal Cloud.

Interview

My focus is on the architecture of Temporal Cloud as a means of making Durable Execution available to every organization without the need to run their own infrastructure, with the highest availability and scalability.

Durable Execution fits control plane patterns like hand and glove, with asynchronous operations that take time and occasionally fail. This made DE popular among people building SaaS services. Temporal Cloud was no exception.

The immediate persona that comes to mind is a developer/architect building a control plane or otherwise automating the management of infrastructure. The broader audience is developers who can see through this use case a broader applicability of Durable Execution for automating all kinds of business processes, without the need for most error handing, retry, and backoff logic.

The immediate takeaway is the pattern for building SaaS control planes or other infrastructure management automation that is proven, easy to apply and to evolve. The more forward-looking takeaway is the value of Durable Execution which liberates developers from a whole host of concerns when building systems.

Topics

Architecture Cloud SaaS Programmability Control Plane
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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