alt Hacker NewsWord on HN is that you're either paying more money than you expected for temporal's managed solution or taking on substantial ops burden ultimately running their very heavy system yourself.
I wouldn't know, I've not done either, but I'd like to learn more from your or other's experience.
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Could you expand on the "substantial ops burden"? Let's say you're using a managed Postgres instance as the underlying data store, how substantial is the ops burden in that case? I understand that temporal is actually a set of 4 or so microservices on top of a data store, but if you're already running a distributed system backed by k8s or something like that, it doesn't seem like it adds significant incremental ops on top of that. But I could be wrong.
Very heavy indeed, people will confuse the durability that Temporal provide with all the other properties a distributed system needs. They will then think that Temporal will solve all their problems.
Their managed solution is pricey and especially the linear scaling with how much you use it is very meh. It's comparable with AWS lambda which also isn't cheap. However it's minor on a typical cloud bill.
Self-hosting is very easy in my experience, I've done it for 2 years but management wanted to move to Temporal Cloud. They have a helm chart which just works including upgrades. This does assume you have the whole k8s shebang set up and working in your company. I never had to touch is outside upgrades which took maybe 30m including validation.
use oban and call it a day: https://oban.pro/
I told an agent to set it up for me for some local stuff. It is written in Go. It has a painless path to run on a local SQLite DB. My agents use it to organize and coordinate workflows. It handles retries and long horizon tasks fine. As far as I can tell for the core workflows and tasks pieces it’s great. MIT license. Like anything it isn’t free to manage but it offers a lot in return. High reliability systems are hard. Temporal only solves some of it. It is far better than rolling it yourself.
I think a genuine problem right now is people are building agentic work flows and learning the hard way highly reliable agentic work flows are hard. Agents are unreliable. They are both not deterministic and not the backing APIs have pretty high error rates. Temporal has solved that pain for me and made it easy to diagnose problems.
I don’t have anything really large scale running. But big enough that it takes billions of tokens and high reliability to finish.