Introduction to Temporal Workflows

This post introduces Temporal Workflows as a core abstraction for reliable and scalable distributed systems, contrasting them with regular function executions. It highlights how Workflows simplify the development of long-running, stateful processes by providing a developer experience equivalent to database transactions, mitigating failure at the platform level and guaranteeing correctness at the application level. The post uses a monthly reminder email use case to illustrate the complexities of implementing such logic with regular functions (requiring cron jobs, message queues, and manual failure/retry handling) versus the simplicity and robustness offered by Temporal Workflows, which allow for direct translation of pseudocode into reliable execution.