Temporal Encyclopedia

Temporal provides developers a suite of effective tools for building reliable applications at scale.

The following Encyclopedia pages describe the concepts, components, and features of Temporal in detail:

Core concepts and overview of the Temporal platform for building reliable distributed applications.

Software development kits that provide APIs and tools for building Temporal applications.

Durable functions that coordinate Activities and maintain state across failures and restarts.

Functions that interact with external systems and can be retried independently of Workflows.

Mechanisms for identifying and handling failures in distributed Temporal applications.

Processes that execute Workflow and Activity code, polling for tasks from the Temporal Service.

Complete record of all events that occurred during a Workflow Execution's lifetime.

Communication patterns including Signals, Queries, and Updates for Workflow interactions.

Workflows that are started by other Workflows, enabling composition and modularity.

Tools and APIs for observing and querying the state of Workflow Executions.

The backend service that manages Workflow state, task distribution, and durability.

Logical isolation boundaries for organizing Workflows, Activities, and other resources.

Service framework for building and operating resilient service APIs with Temporal.

Mechanisms for serializing, deserializing, and transforming data in Temporal applications.

For a complete list of Temporal terms, see the Glossary.

For information on how to implement the developer-facing features see the Develop section.

For information on how to use Temporal Cloud see the Temporal Cloud production deployment section.

For information on how to self-host a Temporal Service see the Self-hosted production deployment section.