Building Invincible Apps with Temporal & Astra DB

When we give developers everything they need, the outcome is better apps and better experiences, and customers who keep coming back again and again. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Temporal Co-Founder and CTO, Samar Abbas, about how they’re empowering developers to build invincible apps using Astra DB. Watch the quick video:

Focusing on the Developer Experience

Today, developers spend a lot of time worrying about their application’s resiliency, but what they care most about is business logic. This is the part of the program that decides how data is created, modified, stored, and displayed. In other words, business logic turns data into value for users or stakeholders. 

Temporal is on a mission to make developers more productive by removing the burden of infrastructure management and allowing them to focus on what they do best: build business logic.

“Our biggest value proposition—although it's about reliability and resiliency—at the end of the day, it's about providing the engineering organization more agility to move faster through the entire lifecycle of software development ,” Samar said.

It’s important to find a balance of meeting developers where they are in the world that they live in (by giving them access to the tools they love), while also taking them into the future (by accelerating their ability to build better apps and experiences). If you can do both, the results are compounding value for users and increased revenue for your business. 

Finding the Right Tech and the Right Partners

When Samar and his Co-Founder started Temporal, their expertise was in building middleware and messaging systems – not running databases. While Samar and Maxim focused on solving developer pains, they needed to find a reliable database. It’s no surprise that they landed on Apache Cassandra. 

However, with the company’s resources dedicated to developing its product, the Temporal team didn’t have time to manage its own Cassandra clusters. Samar and Maxim decided that Astra DB, DataStax’s multi-cloud database-as-a-service built on Cassandra, was the best solution. 

“The key reason that we ended up going with Astra is we felt we could build a partnership,” Samar shared. “The Astra team understands that software has bugs. And we are not looking for bug-free software—nothing like that exists. But whenever something bad does happen, Astra has been amazing.”

Finding the right technology is critical, but creating the right partnership is game-changing. When you’re building or scaling a business, you can’t try to boil the ocean or solve all of the problems yourself. You have to find partners that you can trust as you work together toward solutions.

Failure Doesn’t Exist When You’re Building Invincible Apps

There’s a section of the Temporal website that reads, “It’s never a bad time to be invincible.” I was curious to learn about the concept of invincible apps. Samar’s perspective is that when you’re building invincible apps, failure does not exist. The goal is to create durable execution, meaning the code keeps running no matter what.

Samar used a great analogy to sum up how we should be approaching the future of cloud-native, “invincible” app development: we have to bring builders from the Microsoft Word world of development into the Google Docs world of development, “where they don’t even have to think about their execution as durable.”

With Temporal and Astra DB, this future is looking pretty bright.  

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