The term "Temporal Uber" is not a specific product or service. Instead, it highlights the significant historical connection and evolutionary path between the Temporal platform and its origins as Uber's Cadence, an internal workflow orchestration engine.
What is Temporal?
Temporal is a powerful, mature technology designed for building highly durable and scalable applications by orchestrating complex, long-running business processes. It allows developers to write fault-tolerant code that can survive system outages, network errors, and other failures without losing state or progress.
Key point: Temporal is a mature technology that originated as a fork of Uber's Cadence. It is developed by Temporal Technologies, a startup by the creators of Cadence.
Core Functionality
Temporal ensures that operations (like processing an order, managing a customer support ticket, or deploying software) complete reliably, regardless of how long they take or how many transient failures occur. It achieves this by maintaining the state of your application logic persistently and reliably.
The Uber Connection: Introducing Cadence
Before Temporal, there was Cadence. Cadence was Uber's pioneering open-source workflow orchestration engine, developed internally to solve the challenges of building and maintaining incredibly complex, stateful applications at scale.
At a company like Uber, processes such as a ride lifecycle (matching driver to rider, handling payments, surge pricing, etc.) or complex payroll systems involve numerous steps, often spanning minutes or hours, with multiple external dependencies. These processes require:
- Durability: The ability to pick up exactly where they left off after any system crash or restart.
- Fault Tolerance: Resilience to individual service failures.
- Scalability: Handling millions of concurrent workflows.
Cadence provided this foundational reliability, allowing Uber engineers to write code that behaved as if it were a single, synchronous program, while the underlying system handled distributed execution and failure recovery.
From Cadence to Temporal: An Evolution
The transition from Cadence to Temporal marks a significant evolution:
- The Fork: Temporal was created as a direct fork of Uber's Cadence project. This means it started with the Cadence codebase but then diverged to pursue a different development path and business model.
- New Leadership: Temporal Technologies, the company behind Temporal, was founded by the original creators and core engineers of Cadence. This ensured deep expertise and continuity in design philosophy.
- Dedicated Focus: While Cadence served Uber's internal needs and was open-sourced, Temporal Technologies' focus is on building a robust, enterprise-grade platform and offering dedicated support and services for a broader range of companies.
Why the Evolution?
The move to Temporal as a separate entity allowed the creators to:
- Accelerate Development: Focus exclusively on enhancing the platform for a wider range of use cases beyond Uber's specific needs.
- Provide Commercial Support: Offer professional support, managed services, and additional enterprise features.
- Foster a Broader Community: Grow an independent open-source community around the platform, separate from Uber's internal priorities.
Comparing Cadence and Temporal
While Temporal originated from Cadence, they are now distinct projects.
| Feature | Uber Cadence | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Developed internally at Uber | Forked from Uber's Cadence |
| Developer | Uber (open-source project) | Temporal Technologies (a startup) |
| Maturity | Mature, widely used within Uber | Mature, continually developed & enhanced |
| Support Model | Community-driven (open-source) | Professional support, managed service, and open-source community |
| Focus | Uber's internal needs, general workflow orchestration | Broader enterprise adoption, commercial offerings, and dedicated platform development |
Learning More About Temporal
For developers and organizations looking to implement durable execution and workflow orchestration, Temporal offers extensive resources:
- Courses: Learn the fundamentals and advanced concepts through structured learning paths (e.g., Temporal University).
- Documentation: Access comprehensive guides, API references, and best practices (e.g., Temporal Docs).
In essence, "Temporal Uber" refers to the robust lineage of Temporal, which inherited its battle-tested architecture and core principles from Uber's groundbreaking work with Cadence. Temporal has since evolved to become an independent and highly capable platform for modern distributed applications.
