What is Temporal?
Temporal is a scalable and reliable runtime for durable function executions called Temporal Workflow Executions.
Said another way, it's a platform that guarantees the Durable Execution of your application code.
It enables you to develop as if failures don't even exist. Your application will run reliably even if it encounters problems, such as network outages or server crashes, which would be catastrophic for a typical application. The Temporal Platform handles these types of problems, allowing you to focus on the business logic, instead of writing application code to detect and recover from failures.
The Temporal System
Durable Execution
Durable Execution preserves the state and progress of a Workflow Execution as it runs, so that after a failure the Workflow Execution resumes where it left off. Temporal records each step in an Event History and replays it to restore state. Transient failures, such as crashes and network outages, are retried until they succeed. Permanent failures, such as bugs and bad data, need an intervention, but the Workflow Execution keeps its progress so it can resume after the fix.
For details, see What is Durable Execution?
What is the Temporal Platform?
Watch a short overview of the Temporal Platform:
The Temporal Platform consists of supervising software called the Temporal Service and application code bundled as Worker Processes. Together these components create a runtime for your Temporal Application.
The Temporal Platform
A Temporal Service consists of the Temporal Server, written in Go, and a database.
Our software as a service (SaaS) offering, Temporal Cloud, offers an alternative to hosting the Temporal Service yourself.
Worker Processes are hosted and operated by you and execute your code. Workers run using one of our SDKs.
What is a Temporal Application?
A Temporal Application is a set of Temporal Workflow Executions. Each Temporal Workflow Execution has exclusive access to its local state, executes concurrently to all other Workflow Executions, and communicates with other Workflow Executions and the environment via message passing.
Therefore, a Temporal Workflow Execution executes a Temporal Workflow Definition, also called a Temporal Workflow Function, your application code, exactly once and to completion—whether your code executes for seconds or years, in the presence of arbitrary load and arbitrary failures.
Next steps
Quickstarts
Build a Hello World Workflow in your language.
Developer guides
SDK feature guides and API references.
Develop with AI
Give your coding agent Temporal expertise.
Temporal Cloud
Deploy and run on Temporal Cloud.
Temporal architecture
How the platform works under the hood.
Understanding Temporal
A short overview of Temporal concepts.