Cloud Benchmark: Temporal Cloud vs. Self-Hosted

This post presents a benchmark comparing application-side latency between Temporal Cloud and self-hosted Temporal instances. It quantifies latency improvements across five SDK metrics (WorkflowEndtoEnd, StartWorkflowExecution, SignalWorkflowExecution, RespondWorkflowTaskCompleted, RespondActivityTaskCompleted), demonstrating that Temporal Cloud offers significantly lower latency. The improvements are attributed to Temporal Cloud's custom persistence layer, which features more efficient sharding, a write-ahead log (WAL), and tiered data storage, designed for high throughput and large scale. The benchmark results suggest that the benefits of this custom persistence layer outweigh the increased network latency incurred when using Temporal Cloud. The post also discusses the operational and cost benefits of Temporal Cloud over self-hosting for production workloads.