Temporal Durable Execution & Workflow Orchestration AI Skill Guide

Overview & Engine Architecture

Temporal provides durable execution: workflow state is event-sourced; workers replay history to recover. Workflow code must be deterministic; Activities hold all I/O (HTTP, DB, messaging). The server (Frontend/History/Matching) persists to a primary database; Visibility is a separate search index (eventually consistent).

Client -> Temporal Server (gRPC, auth/mTLS)
            -> History (event log) -> Persistence (Postgres/MySQL/Cassandra)
            -> Matching (task queues)
Workers (poll task queues)
    -> Workflow sandbox (replay)
    -> Activities (retries, timeouts, heartbeats)

When to use / when not to