workflow-orchestration-patterns

To design a Temporal workflow for a long-running distributed process, separate orchestration logic into workflows and external calls into activities. This enforces deterministic execution and automatic state recovery for reliable multi-step coordination.

Saga compensation flows in distributed systems are handled by defining rollback activities for each step in a Temporal workflow. This ensures failure-safe execution by automatically reversing completed operations when a downstream process fails.

Idempotency and retries for external calls in Temporal workflows are implemented by isolating side effects in activities. You configure retry policies on activities to automatically handle transient failures while ensuring operations remain idempotent.

Workflow orchestration for distributed processes is needed when coordinating multi-step business processes, parallel fan-out/fan-in jobs, or human-in-the-loop callbacks. It prevents losing progress and ensures state consistency across long-running operations.

Temporal workflows support parallel fan-out and fan-in jobs by dispatching multiple activities concurrently and waiting for their completion. This pattern allows efficient distributed processing while maintaining automatic state recovery.

Temporal workflows lose state during long-running executions if external calls are placed directly in workflow logic instead of activities. Moving non-deterministic operations into activities enforces determinism and enables automatic state recovery.