Temporal with Max Fateev

There are countless real world scenarios where a workflow or process has multiple steps, and some steps must be completed before others can be started. Think of something as simple as cooking dinner. First you look up a recipe, then you write down the ingredients you need, you go shopping, and then you cook. These steps must be run in a certain order, and the state of the workflow must be tracked throughout. Workflow management is everywhere in the software world, and today it’s common for teams to engineer custom solutions. This makes sense, because creating a general-purpose solution for workflow management is a hard conceptual problem, and perhaps an even harder engineering challenge.

Maxim Fateev has a deep background engineering distributed systems and workflow management services at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In 2015, he joined Uber and helped create the open-source project, Cadence, which is an orchestration engine to execute asynchronous long-running business logic. The success of Cadence led Max to co-found Temporal, which is an open-source programming package for workflow execution. Max joins the show today to talk about the engineering challenges at Temporal, the concept of “durable execution”, how he organizes his engineering teams, and more.