Temporal Workflow Systems for SRE
Summary
Durable workflow orchestration using Temporal for SRE automation. Codified incident response, infrastructure provisioning, and operational runbooks as reliable, observable workflows.
Problem
Manual runbooks for incident response and infrastructure operations were error-prone, inconsistent across team members, and lacked visibility into execution state and history.
Constraints
- Workflows must survive worker restarts and infrastructure failures
- Full execution history for post-incident review
- Must integrate with existing alerting and communication tools
- Gradual adoption: new workflows alongside existing manual processes
Architecture
Temporal server cluster with Go workers executing typed workflows and activities. Workflows codify operational procedures — each step is durable, retryable, and observable.
Key decisions
- Temporal over custom job queues: Built-in durability, retry policies, and execution history eliminate most infrastructure complexity
- Go workers: Type-safe workflow definitions, single-binary deployment, low resource overhead
- Activity-based integration: Each external system interaction is an isolated activity — testable and independently retryable
Outcome
Operational workflows run reliably through infrastructure failures. Incident response time reduced through automated, codified procedures with full execution visibility.
Stack
Go, Temporal, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, PagerDuty API, Slack API