Temporal is an open-source durable workflow engine that allows developers to write fault-tolerant, long-running, and stateful applications using simple code. This guide walks you through setting up Temporal locally, writing your first workflow, and running it end-to-end using the TypeScript SDK.
Problem: Distributed Systems Are Complex to Manage
Building modern software systems isn’t getting any easier. As companies move to the cloud and break their applications into microservices, the promise is agility and scalability. But what developers actually end up with is a tangled web of APIs, message queues, retry logic, and fragile cron jobs. A single user action — like placing an order or submitting a loan application — can trigger dozens of interconnected processes that need to happen in the right order, with the right timing, and ideally, never fail. But they do fail. Networks timeout. Services go down. Scheduled jobs disappear silently. And every failure is another patch, another workaround, another sleepless night for engineers. Writing and maintaining the glue code to handle these failures gracefully is frustrating, repetitive, and hard to test. It’s like trying to build a house of cards in the middle of a windstorm — one shaky piece and everything crashes. That’s the harsh reality of distributed systems today.