September 16, 2022

Temporal Community Newsletter: September 2022

Charles Zedlewski

Charles Zedlewski

This blog post is a public copy of our monthly newsletter sent on September 9. If you'd like to receive upcoming updates by email, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.

We're so happy to have met many of you at Replay, Temporal's inaugural developer experience conference, a few weeks ago. Replay had everything from live architecture reviews to Temporal 101 workshops, discussions about SDKs, cloud, and engineering, as well as talks from Datadog, Stripe, Square, and Yum! Brands.

If you weren't able to join Replay in person, don't despair! We're working on a series of regional events for 2023 (more details on that below). In the meantime, we've added session recordings from this year's event to this playlist for you to view and share.

We've also arranged for you to get a sneak peek at Temporal Cloud later this month; don't miss A Guided Tour of Temporal's New Web UI on September 23.

For more information on what we've been working on, just keep reading! And as always, we'd love to hear from you—feel free to share feedback in our Community Slack group, or on Twitter (@temporalio).

Technology

Batch operation API: Batch operations make it easier to operate large scale systems. While Temporal has long supported some form of batch operations, we recognized the need for improvements. In V1.18, we've surfaced an explicit Batch Operation API which is supported at a namespace level and should make leveraging our batch capabilities much more straightforward.

Multi-cursor queue: This improves persistence resource utilization and provides better isolation between tenants. This update is coming in V1.18.

Python SDK beta: In the last newsletter, we announced that our Python SDK had reached the alpha milestone. Since then, we've made immense progress and are incredibly excited to announce that our Python SDK has reached the beta milestone. More than that, we are in the final stages of beta and already have our eyes on a GA release. If you haven't already started experimenting with the Python SDK, there's never been a better time.

New default tctl experience: tctl is one of the most critical tools for managing your Temporal Cluster and its resources. Historically, the user experience of tctl has left…well, something to be desired. That's why we are so excited for tctl v2, which provides a more powerful experience with far better UX. tctl v2 will become the default experience in Temporal Server version 1.18. Along with this release, we are also deprecating the original tctl as well as Web UI v1 on September 30, 2022.

Auto-config for Spring Boot: It's rare to be a Java developer in 2022 and not work with Spring Boot in some way. Although you could always manually configure Spring Boot with Temporal, the outcome is usually not ideal and leaves the hard work to users. With auto-config support, working with Spring Boot will become a first-class experience in Temporal.

Spring Boot demos: Spring Boot integration was recently added to Java SDK and the support team is working hard to have companion demos for that functionality. We also have plans for demos of the beta-stage schedules functionality that will be enabled in the next server release, version 1.18.

Brand new documentation guides: We are constantly on the lookout for gaps in our product adoption process that could be addressed exclusively by adding new content (eg: not developing anything new). We've found guides to be an excellent tool for covering multiple of these gaps at once. The team is actively working on a guide for Getting started with Temporal Cloud, as well as guides for managing your certificates and namespaces in Temporal Cloud.

Knowledge Base added to our docs: The new Knowledge Base (KB) articles section introduces a new information archetype to our existing documentation. The Knowledge Base goes beyond step-by-step instructions and explanations of key concepts, providing relevant details on a specific topic. For example, want to know the differences between Cadence and Temporal? We have an article for that!

Content and Community

Re-Replay (localized mini Temporal conferences)

Replay was so above and beyond our expectations that we want to do it again. And again. And again and again. So, yes, there will be a Replay next year, for sure, BUT! For those in other regions of the world or who couldn't make it to Seattle, we think a mini version might be just what the dinosaur ordered.

Can you imagine? A single day - with a live architecture review, a couple of BoF discussions, a customer talk or two highlighting experience and lessons learned and, you're invited.

To make it happen, jump on our community Slack and send a DM to Rain, Temporal's newest Developer Advocate and actual live dinosaur. And we'll see you there.

First self-serve Temporal course coming soon: Our Education team is working hard to bring you our first self-paced course focusing on Temporal's fundamental building blocks, Workflows and Activities. The course will be available by October, but you can sign up now to be notified when the course goes live. Sign up now and we'll also let you know about other courses and learning opportunities in the future. https://learn.temporal.io/courses

We want YOU!

We'd love your help in making Temporal great. Please review our contribution guide.

If you'd like to work on or propose a new feature, first peruse our proposals repo to discover existing active and accepted proposals. Feel free to join the Temporal community or Slack channel to start a discussion or check if a feature has already been discussed. Once you're sure the proposal is not covered elsewhere, please follow our proposal instructions or submit your own feature request.

And, frankly, any time you participate in any way, you're contributing to this fantastic project and we cannot thank you enough.

Recent forum highlights include:

Upcoming Events

Community Spotlight

Alexandra Li from Convoy Tech is the author of this month's Community Spotlight.

Intern Summer Spotlight: Temporal Replay through CircleCI ›

Alexandra wrote an outstanding post about integrating the Temporal Replay functionality with a CI/CD pipeline (CircleCI). This is a very common pattern for Temporal adopters, so having reference material from a real user is a huge improvement!

Twitter thread of the month

Check out @DominikTornow's favorite academic papers related to Temporal.