A great SAAS service requires a robust Control Plane as its brain. The Control Plane automates infrastructure provisioning, deployments, configuration, monitoring, fleet management, capacity allocation to customers, and so forth. Building a control plane is daunting and error prone. There are myriad long lived API calls on shared resources, and they occasionally fail. Reliable orchestration of these APIs is a crucial part of a healthy control plane. In this talk, we introduce the concept of Durable Execution, with a real world example of how we use it to build the Control Plane for Temporal Cloud.
Interview:
What's the focus of your work these days?
My focus is on the architecture of Temporal Cloud as a means of making Durable Execution available to every organization without the need to run their own infrastructure, with the highest availability and scalability.
What's the motivation for your talk at QCon San Francisco 2023?
Durable Execution fits control plane patterns like hand and glove, with asynchronous operations that take time and occasionally fail. This made DE popular among people building SaaS services. Temporal Cloud was no exception.
How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?
The immediate persona that comes to mind is a developer/architect building a control plane or otherwise automating the management of infrastructure. The broader audience is developers who can see through this use case a broader applicability of Durable Execution for automating all kinds of business processes, without the need for most error handing, retry, and backoff logic.
Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?
The immediate takeaway is the pattern for building SaaS control planes or other infrastructure management automation that is proven, easy to apply and to evolve. The more forward-looking takeaway is the value of Durable Execution which liberates developers from a whole host of concerns when building systems.
Speaker
Sergey Bykov
SDE @Temporal Technologies
Sergey Bykov is responsible for the architecture of Temporal Cloud, a hosted service that is helping businesses, from large enterprises to tiny startups, to build invincible applications. Prior to joining Temporal Sergey was one of the founders of the Orleans project at Microsoft Research and led its development for over a decade. The mediocre state of developer tools for cloud services and distributed systems at the time inspired him to join the Orleans project in order to qualitatively improve developer productivity in that area. The same passion brought him to Temporal.