Workflow Engine Design Principles with Temporal

What this post added

This post provides a foundational explanation of workflow engine design principles, drawing parallels to Temporal's architecture. It details the historical evolution leading to Temporal, defines the core properties of a workflow (resilient, executes tasks, reacts to events, deals with time), and elaborates on key components like task queues and timer queues. A significant focus is placed on the necessity of transactional updates across state, task queues, and timers to ensure consistency and prevent race conditions. The post also outlines Temporal's scalability approach, emphasizing scaling out the number of workflows and the use of sharding for distributed persistence and hosts.