logoalt Hacker News

taberiandtoday at 8:47 AM1 replyview on HN

> Depending on how your code is written, modifying code baked into workflows becomes complex, as anything that modifies the history event ordering breaks determinism in already-deployed workers.

I see this as Temporal surfacing inherent complexity of the domain in a way that forces the developer to consider it, rather than introducing extra complexity.

If it didn't make workflow determinism a strict requirement, the requirement would still exist - it would just hurt much worse in production when it's broken.

See also: Rust borrowing


Replies

inglortoday at 5:38 PM

Actually Temporal does have a way to avoid determinism called rainbow deployments.

If you're fine with deploying several versions of workers (and are on a reasonably new version) you can just avoid the determinism issue altogether with their k8s controller.

If you do need to have some long workflows, there is an explicit hook for "what happens to existing workflows on version upgrade".

But to be fair - none of the other orchastrators I used (like AirFlow) made me write workflows.IsNewCode/IsOldCode like temporal does. On the other hand AirFlow doesn't even have the capability to do that in the first place (or at least it didn't last I used it).

show 1 reply