Strange Loop

Workflows, a new abstraction for distributed systems

For the past 45 years, the database systems community has enjoyed an unparalleled developer experience: Database Transactions mitigate challenges such as failure on a platform level, entirely eliminating these challenges on an applications level.

Unfortunately, the distributed systems community has not enjoyed a similar developer experience: There was no equivalent abstraction that mitigates challenges like failure on a platform level.

However, many companies, including Snap, Uber, and Netflix, are adopting a new paradigm: Workflows. Workflows are to distributed systems what transactions are to databases.

This talk explores how Workflow Systems mitigate challenges on a platform level and provide a developer experience for distributed systems that rivals the developer experience for databases, allowing you to literally code as if failure does not even exist!

Dominik Tornow

Temporal, Principal Engineer

Dominik Tornow is a Principal Engineer at Temporal. He focuses on systems modeling, specifically conceptual and formal modeling, to support the design and documentation of complex software systems.