Orchestration powered by Temporal: Wrap, don’t rewrite

This post details Zscaler's approach to building a next-generation automation platform by using Temporal Workflows as a durable orchestration layer above heterogeneous execution engines (Ansible, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Kubernetes Cluster API, AWS CloudFormation, Jenkins). The core contribution is the 'brownfield wrapping' pattern, where existing tools are wrapped as leaf-level Activities in Temporal Workflows without refactoring them. This provides durability, enables cross-engine workflows, allows for incremental adoption, and preserves direct usability of the underlying engines. The post emphasizes that Temporal Workflows act as a contract that survives worker failures, making complex sequences recoverable and retries configurable. It also positions this pattern as a foundation for integrating AI workflows as new leaf activities.