Standalone Activities

7/28/2026

This post introduces and demonstrates the use of Temporal Standalone Activities as a mechanism to bridge external event sources (Pub/Sub) to Temporal Workflows. It highlights how Standalone Activities can replace complex custom retry and state management logic in event handlers, leading to simpler, more robust systems. The post provides code examples for both the Standalone Activity definition and its invocation from a client, emphasizing the importance of deterministic IDs and conflict policies for reliable execution and visibility in the Temporal UI.

7/23/2026

This post details the use of Temporal Standalone Activities to bridge a Pub/Sub event to a Temporal Workflow for a PII-compliant data pipeline. It explains how an `ingestion_handler` Activity, triggered by a Pub/Sub event, starts a `ComplaintWorkflow`. The post also outlines the functional and non-functional requirements of the pipeline and justifies the choice of Temporal for orchestration, highlighting its benefits in resilience, consistency, availability, and observability.

5/14/2026

This post announces the Public Preview of Standalone Activities, a new capability that allows Temporal Activities to be executed independently of Workflows. It details how to invoke these activities using client calls with specific parameters like `id`, `task_queue`, and `start_to_close_timeout`. The post highlights the benefits of default durability, full visibility via stable IDs and UI/CLI/API, and the ability to reuse Activity code in both standalone jobs and Workflows. It also lists supported SDKs and core capabilities available in preview, along with planned features for General Availability.

7/13/2022

This 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.