What is Temporal?
Temporal is an open source platform designed to make your application code durable and resilient to failures.
đź’ˇ To learn more about the basics, check out the Understanding Temporal page.
The most valuable mission critical workloads in any software are long running and tie together multiple services. With Temporal, your application will run reliably even if it encounters problems, such as network outages or server crashes, which would be catastrophic for a typical application.
Temporal allows you to develop your applications as if failures don’t exist. Instead of writing complex error-handling code and application code to detect and recover from failures, you can focus entirely on your business logic. Temporal takes care of the heavy lifting, guaranteeing that your workflows are executed to completion - whether they run for seconds, days, or even years.
Durable Execution​
At the heart of Temporal is the concept of Durable Execution and allows your applications to be resilient and durable by default. It is the guarantee that, once started, your application will run to completion despite adverse conditions (such as a crash or hardware failure) that would otherwise cause it to fail. Durable Execution makes your applications invincible.
This durability isn't magic — it's achieved through Event History which keeps a record of each step in a Workflow Execution. If something goes wrong, the Workflow can resume exactly where it left off at its last recorded event, without losing any progress. This durability makes your applications reliable and resilient, allowing you to execute code exactly once and to completion, regardless of how long it takes.
Ready to build your first invincible application? Start with Temporal's open-source platform and join a global community of developers embracing reliability and scalability by default. Whether you self-host Temporal to harness the power of open source or leverage Temporal Cloud for hassle-free scalability and management, you can build applications with unmatched reliability.
What is the Temporal Platform?​
The Temporal Platform consists of a Temporal Service and Worker Processes. Together these components create a runtime for Workflow Executions.
The Temporal Platform consists of a supervising software typically called the Temporal Service and application code bundled as Worker Processes. Together these components create a runtime for your application.
A Temporal Service consists of the Temporal Server and a database.
Our software as a service (SaaS) offering, Temporal Cloud, offers an alternative to hosting the Temporal Service yourself.
Worker Processes are hosted and operated by you and execute your code. Workers run using one of our SDKs.
What is a Temporal Application?​
A Temporal Application is a set of Temporal Workflow Executions. Each Temporal Workflow Execution has exclusive access to its local state, executes concurrently to all other Workflow Executions, and communicates with other Workflow Executions and the environment via message passing.
A Temporal Application can consist of millions to billions of Workflow Executions. Workflow Executions are lightweight components. A Workflow Execution consumes few compute resources; in fact, if a Workflow Execution is suspended, such as when it is in a waiting state, the Workflow Execution consumes no compute resources at all.
Therefore, a Temporal Workflow Execution executes a Temporal Workflow Definition, also called a Temporal Workflow Function, your application code, exactly once and to completion—whether your code executes for seconds or years, in the presence of arbitrary load and arbitrary failures.