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Standalone Activities

5 posts · Jul 2022 – Sep 2026

What this trail covers

Standalone Activities are now Generally Available across Go, Python, Java, TypeScript, .NET, and Ruby SDKs. They provide a durable record of execution for background jobs, including retries, visibility, and control, eliminating the need for custom job systems. Features like Activity ID for uniqueness, Conflict and Reuse Policies, Heartbeating for long-running jobs, and Search Attributes for discoverability are supported. Start Delay allows scheduling jobs for later execution. Priority and Fairness mechanisms are available for sharing Worker capacity. Standalone Activities can be invoked independently or as part of a larger Temporal Workflow. Planned work includes direct support for Temporal Schedules, audit exports, Nexus integration, and enhanced manual completion.

All Temporal trails
  1. A better job queue with Temporal Standalone ActivitiesThis post announces the General Availability of Standalone Activities across multiple SDKs, positioning them as a robust replacement for custom job queues. It details how Standalone Activities provide durable execution, visibility, and control for background jobs, contrasting them with traditional queues. Key features highlighted include Activity ID, Conflict/Reuse Policies, Heartbeating, Search Attributes, Start Delay, and Priority/Fairness for worker capacity sharing. The post also touches on the integration of Standalone Activities within larger Temporal Workflows and provides a migration example from Coinbase.
  2. Bridging Pub/Sub to Temporal with Standalone ActivitiesThis post details the practical application of Temporal Standalone Activities for bridging Pub/Sub messages to Temporal Workflows. It highlights how Standalone Activities keep event handlers thin and decoupled by offloading durability, retries, and timeouts to Temporal. The post emphasizes the importance of using deterministic Workflow IDs derived from the event source (e.g., file path) and configuring `WorkflowIDConflictPolicy.USE_EXISTING` to ensure correct behavior during retries and prevent duplicate workflow executions. It also explains how to set unique Activity IDs for each message and use `ActivityIDConflictPolicy.USE_EXISTING` to manage redelivered messages. The author shares personal anecdotes illustrating the complexity of manual state management and retry logic before Standalone Activities, underscoring their value.
  3. The foundation: Why Temporal for a data pipeline?This post introduces the use of Temporal Standalone Activities to initiate a data pipeline triggered by a Pub/Sub event. It details the architecture for processing CSV files containing customer complaints, including PII scanning, classification, redaction, and semantic search. The post justifies the use of Temporal by mapping functional and non-functional requirements (resilience, consistency, availability, observability) to Temporal's features like Durable Execution and the Event History. It also provides a high-level architecture overview and a sample Workflow code snippet.
  4. Standalone Activities: Durable job processing, now in Public PreviewThis post announces the Public Preview of Standalone Activities, a feature that allows Temporal Activities to run independently of Workflows. It details how to invoke them directly from a client using `client.execute_activity`, highlighting their durable persistence, retry capabilities, and visibility in the Temporal Web UI. The post contrasts this with traditional job queue systems, emphasizing benefits like default durability, full visibility via stable IDs, and the ability to seamlessly transition to Workflows. It lists supported SDKs and core capabilities, with future GA features mentioned. Getting started guides for various SDKs are provided.
  5. Node.js Task Queue SolutionThis post details how Temporal can be used as a more robust and feature-rich alternative to traditional Node.js task queue libraries like Bull, Agenda, and Kue. It provides code examples demonstrating how to implement a simple email sending task using Temporal Workflows and Activities, contrasting it with a BullMQ implementation. Key advantages highlighted include Temporal's UI for monitoring, stronger type safety with TypeScript, built-in retry policies for activities, the use of `sleep()` for delays and scheduling, and the ability to orchestrate complex multi-part task series and conditional logic within a single durable Workflow, which is significantly more complex with traditional task queues.