workflow-orchestration-patterns

Temporal separates orchestration logic from external interactions by defining workflows for state management and activities for side effects. Workflows maintain determinism constraints while activities handle external API calls, enabling resilient long-running processes.

State management for long-running processes is handled by durable orchestration frameworks. Workflow state persists between execution steps, allowing processes to resume correctly after failures, timeouts, or async callbacks without losing progress.

Entity workflows manage the lifecycle of individual entities as long-running processes. They encapsulate entity-specific state and logic, allowing concurrent access and modifications while maintaining isolation and consistency across the distributed workflow.

Async callbacks handle external events and human approvals by allowing workflows to pause and wait for specific signals. The workflow remains durable during the wait, resuming execution immediately upon receiving the external event response.

Workflow determinism constraints ensure that workflow code produces the exact same sequence of commands upon replay. This is critical for state recovery, as non-deterministic behavior causes state corruption and prevents resilient error handling during failures.