Getting Started with Temporal: Workflow Orchestration Made Simple

You’ve built an API calling three services: payment, inventory, shipping. Service 2 fails. Now what? Manual retries? State tracking? Most developers reach for duct tape solutions—custom retry logic, database state management, fragile error handling. Temporal eliminates this. It makes workflows durable, letting you write normal code while handling failures, retries, and state automatically.

What Temporal Actually Is

Temporal is an open-source workflow engine that makes code durable. Workflows are regular code (Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, PHP, .NET) running for days, months, or years—surviving crashes, restarts, infrastructure failures. Not no-code. Not YAML. Code-first: write stateful functions, Temporal handles reliability.

Build an order workflow, Temporal ensures completion even if servers crash. Build data pipelines, failed steps retry automatically. State management, retries, fault tolerance are platform features—not scattered across codebases.

Used by NVIDIA, Snap, and enterprises, Temporal handles 200+ million executions per second. Second-fastest workflow engine in benchmarks. Unlike Python-only tools like Airflow, it supports multiple languages. Go backends and TypeScript services? Temporal works for both.

How Temporal Works

Durability comes from Event History. Temporal records every workflow step. API calls—activities, timers, signals—send Commands to Temporal Service, mapped to Events and persisted. Application crashes? Temporal replays Event History, recreates pre-crash state, continues execution.

Think version control for runtime. Git tracks code; Temporal tracks execution. Worker dies? Temporal checks out last good state, continues.

Execution flow: Workers poll Task Queues for tasks. Task arrives, worker runs workflow code, reports results. Service adds new tasks based on results. Process repeats until completion. Every step logged. Every decision persisted. Failures trigger replay.

Practical Example: Order Processing

E-commerce checkout: charge customer, reserve inventory, send notification. Without Temporal:

async function processOrder(orderId) {
  const order = await db.getOrder(orderId);

  if (order.status !== 'payment_charged') {
    try {
      await chargePayment(order);
      await db.updateStatus(orderId, 'payment_charged');
    } catch (error) {
      // Manual retry? Backoff? Give up?
    }
  }
  // More state checks, more retry logic...
}

Manual state tracking. Custom retry logic. Payment succeeds, inventory fails—retry? rollback? State machine grows complex. Error handling gets fragile.

With Temporal:

export async function orderWorkflow(order: Order) {
  await activities.chargePayment(order.customerId, order.total);
  await activities.reserveInventory(order.items);
  await activities.sendShippingNotification(order.customerId);
  return { status: 'completed' };
}

That’s it. No state tracking. No retry logic. Temporal handles failures, replays from Event History, ensures completion. reserveInventory fails? Temporal retries with configurable backoff. Server crashes after payment? Temporal restarts at inventory—payment already recorded.

Linear code. Clear logic. Automatic reliability.

When to Use Temporal

Powerful, not universal. Use for complex, long-running, reliability-critical workflows. Skip for simple operations.

Use Temporal for:

• Multi-step workflows with dependencies
• Long-running processes (hours to months)
• Reliability-critical operations (payments, approvals)
• Event-driven workflows (webhooks, queues)
• Microservices orchestration

Skip Temporal for:

• Simple API calls
• CRUD operations
• Stateless functions
• Quick jobs (Celery, BullMQ)

Examples: Use for e-commerce checkout with payment, inventory, shipping. Use for data pipelines across services. Skip for single emails. Skip for CRUD endpoints. Decision hinges on complexity and durability needs.

Failure means lost progress or corrupted state? Use Temporal. Failure means “try again” with no consequences? Probably don’t need it.

Getting Started

Easy to try locally. Temporal CLI starts dev server in under two seconds. No complex setup.

Quickstart:

1. Install Temporal CLI
2. Run temporal server start-dev
3. Write workflow in your language
4. Run worker to execute code
5. Trigger workflow, watch execution

Official Getting Started guide covers all languages. Baeldung’s Java tutorial (December 2025) covers basics and advanced patterns. Example applications available in official repo.

Developer experience is intentionally linear. Start simple, add complexity as needed. Local testing is straightforward—workflows are deterministic. Replay same events, get same results.

Why This Matters

Workflow orchestration has been a pain point for years. Custom solutions. Fragile state machines. Debugging retry logic at 2 AM. Temporal abstracts this into a platform. Write workflows as code. Platform handles durability, retries, state.

Temporal is gaining traction as a top emerging developer tool in 2026. It solves distributed system problems: reliable, long-running workflows without custom orchestration. The answer is durable execution. The answer is Temporal.

Building workflows today? You’re writing boilerplate or using tools not designed for your use case. Temporal was designed for this problem. Worth evaluating.