workflow-orchestration-patterns

The saga pattern provides comprehensive guidance on implementing distributed transactions using compensation logic for rollback capabilities. You define orchestration logic separately from external task execution to ensure reliable state management across microservices.

Temporal handles state management by ensuring workflows are deterministic and automatically preserving state across failures. It enforces determinism constraints so that workflow execution remains reproducible, preventing side effects within the core orchestration logic.

Managing long-running processes in distributed systems is best achieved using entity workflows. These manage the lifecycle and state of individual entities as durable workflows, incorporating resilience patterns like retries, idempotency, and activity heartbeats.

Fan-out fan-in execution facilitates parallel execution for concurrent task processing within your workflow orchestration. You trigger multiple activities simultaneously and wait for all results to aggregate, enabling efficient asynchronous task completion.

Workflows wait for external events or human input asynchronously using async callback mechanisms. This allows the distributed process to pause indefinitely without consuming resources, resuming automatically once the expected external signal is received.

Workflow orchestration requires strict versioning strategies to maintain determinism constraints when updating long-running processes. Non-deterministic changes to existing workflow code can break state replay, requiring careful versioning to avoid execution failures.