Temporal: 2023 Year in Review

At Temporal, we fundamentally believe that Durable Execution will improve the developer experience for everyone and as we look back on 2023, we feel we made some headway on making this a reality. It was a big year for us, but more importantly for our customers and community, and we are delighted that you have been on this road with us.

Let's take a look back at 2023…

Our raison d’etre – the Temporal community and customers

Temporal is an open-source company and active member of the open-source community. Since our inception, our Github repo has maintained steady growth, and today has collected over 8.8k stars. Over the last year, we also saw our community Slack workspace grow to over 10,000 members. And all the while, Max, our co-founder as well as many of our key engineers remain active and helpful in this important channel.

We spent a lot of our time out on the road last year, and we were humbled by the excitement and engagement thousands of you gave us at meetups around the world. This last year we got together at meetups in New York, Singapore, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Melbourne, Chicago, Dallas, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Sydney, Seattle, Raleigh, London, and Paris, and we look forward to spending time with you in more places next year – stay tuned.

Like many of you, we too, are building a company and also celebrate some of our commercial success. So many of you trust us to run mission-critical workloads on Temporal Cloud. In fact, last year, we welcomed over 800 new customers and deployed thousands of namespaces. We are thankful to our team that worked nights and weekends to provide this rock-solid service, but more importantly we appreciate ALL of our customers large and small.

This was also the year we launched a Startups program (which provides $2400 in free cloud credits) and we've had over 100 of you join the program. Also, our Temporal Partner Ecosystem rolled out in 2023 and our partners have already delivered services to help users successfully navigate getting their Temporal apps to prod.

A new primitive, so many features and SDKs!

The Temporal project has come a long way and we continue to innovate in and around it so that it is more approachable and applicable. Whether this means adding new features to the core project, making improvements to our managed service or delivering wholly new SDKs, we've been pretty busy.

We worked a lot on the core capabilities of Temporal, but three key highlights include:

• Workflow Update is our first new primitive that combined two previous operations (signals and queries) into a single synchronous blocking call. This feature allows users to drastically simplify their Temporal logic for updating ongoing workflows.
• Temporal Schedules are a replacement for traditional Cron jobs for task scheduling. Schedules allow users to durably execute tasks, get insight and visibility into their progress, and start, stop and pause them arbitrarily!
• The timeline view is one of the most well-loved features we shipped this year. Users rave about how easy this view makes it to understand and visualize workflows from start to finish, whether you’re running your own cluster or using the Temporal Cloud service!

We learned a whole lot about running the Temporal service in 2023 as we onboarded thousands of namespaces on Temporal Cloud, and we are blown away by the positive feedback and constructive input you all have provided. The offering has matured a lot and some of the highlights from the last year are:

• New Regions - We added three new available regions for Temporal Cloud (sa-east-1, ap-south-1, and us-east-2) to bring the total to 12 regions around the world.
• Enhanced automation capabilities - We streamlined Temporal Cloud for power users with the introduction of our Cloud Operations API which allows you to automate management of Users, Namespaces, and Accounts. We also added support for secure programmatic access to Temporal Cloud through API Key Authentication.

Finally, in 2023 we also added two fully supported SDKs to bring our total to six. Back in the spring we added Python and more recently we added the .NET SDK. While these major milestones are important, there was also a massive amount of work put into making all our SDKs more feature complete. If you want to get started building with any of our SDKs, head to our dev guide in docs.

You can find a full list of the features and launches in our changelog.

Replay Replay 2023

2023 also saw the second installation of our Replay Conference, our flagship event in Seattle. This year we tripled the number of talks and nearly doubled the amount of attendees. It was an exciting, fun-filled three days and we were delighted that so many of you joined us, and are thankful for all our speakers who joined us from a wide range of companies, including: AfterPay, AirWallex, Autokitteh, AWS, Better, Bitovi, Bright Machines, Cosmonic, Datadog, Grab, Hashicorp, Hasura, Instacart, JP Morgan Chase, Linus Health, Logikcull, Logixboard, Maersk, Microsoft, MongoDB, Netflix, Retool, Rippling, SoFi, Stripe, Turo, Twilio, Will Bank and Yum Brands… WOW!

You can "replay" all the talks on our Replay site right now if you like. A few highlight talks include:

• Distilling Durable Execution - In this keynote, Temporal founder and CEO, Maxim Fateev provided a clear and easy to understand explanation of Durable Execution and how to think about using Temporal.
• Temporal: A year later - In this followup to the 2022 event, Mat McDole from Yum Brands! (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Habit Burger) walked through how they've now rethought their ecommerce order system on Temporal. This talk is FULL of great advice.
• From Monolith to Workflows - Sai Pragna Etikyala from Twilio walked through how the messaging team is breaking down their monolith and reworking it into Temporal workflows.
• Deploying SaaS using Temporal - Chris Ludden and Anthony Davis from the Hashicorp team demonstrated their code generation approach that allows internal users to be more productive.
• DAGs on Temporal? - Roberto Fernandez discussed the patterns Retool is using to improve the performance of executing DAGs of code blocks for their users.
• Managing Kafka - Patroklos Stefanou walked us through Stripe’s experience using Temporal for managing Kafka Clusters, including a great use of signals.

The product keynote also provided amazing demos of some of the features we mentioned above and is super valuable. If you're interested in the 2024 event, super early bird registration is open now ;)

A more approachable Temporal

2023 was also the year we invested heavily in training, support, and content to help developers learn Temporal with more ease, and we think we did alright! Here are some content highlights that you might find helpful:

• We released Temporal 101 and Temporal 102 courses in four different programming languages, making it possible to get started with Temporal in hours, rather than weeks and saw over 6000 course enrollments.
• Our most viewed webinar was "What is a Saga".
• Our most visited blog was "Introducing Temporal .NET".
• We published a hefty 815 changes to our Documentation.
• Our Developer Success team delivered over 500 sessions right from onboarding to code/design reviews and worker tuning.

And in case you missed it, we completely revamped our website to improve how viewers can think about and explain Temporal.

We ended 2023 with a bang seamlessly supporting our customers through their busiest and most critical periods over Black Friday and New Year’s Eve, and received this kind shoutout from The Pragmatic Engineer.

Sneak peek into 2024

2024 is already shaping up to be a great year and our team is excited to deliver on some of the key product investments we made over the last year. Stay tuned for upcoming launches of new capabilities such as multi-region availability, self-serve signup and Google Cloud Platform options for Temporal Cloud, as well as some secret project work around the simplification of workers, cross-namespace communications and maybe a new SDK.

Thanks again for joining us in 2023 and we look forward to a great 2024 with you all. To keep up to date on news and events, please join our community on Slack and register to receive our monthly newsletter.