A Practical Guide to Temporal Workflow Design Patterns

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Long-running, distributed business processes often require careful coordination, state management, and fault handling. Temporal offers a code-first approach to durable workflows: developers write ordinary code for orchestration, and the Temporal service persists state, retries failed tasks, and resumes execution after failures. This shifts focus from plumbing (queues, retries, timeouts) to domain logic, but it also encourages reuse of proven patterns. The Temporal community and documentation highlight several orchestration patterns — for example, sagas, state machines/actors, polling strategies, fan-out/fan-in, and versioning patterns — that solve recurring problems in workflow design. This article surveys these patterns, explaining when and how to use them, with concise code snippets to illustrate their implementation in Temporal.