It’s a very valid question but it’s just a bit timely since Mitchell tweeted a few days ago about how most of HashiCorp cloud is built on Temporal tech.

Disclaimer: head of product at Temporal. Temporal is not container orchestration and is not an infrastructure management tool. In most cases users run Temporal on top of Kubernetes.

Temporal provides a distributed experience which is decoupled from the reliability of any specific piece of hardware. We provide a programming model for writing distributed applications without needing to code around all points of failure. We still are working on what to call the tech exactly, it’s not something that is widely known by any name today. It’s sort of like virtualized distributed computing.

So instead of say Kubernetes I could use Nomad for orchestration of my todo list MVC and Temporal on that same Nomad host, and others, and non-Nomad hosts, for my distributed data pipelines, or cleanup jobs, or email marketing etc right? What I mean to say is: is that scenario one valid/proper use of Temporal as you all envision it especially within the context of tools HashiCorp provides too.

Temporal doesn't have an opinion on how you manage your infrastructure. Most users consume our docker images but there is zero reason you can't compile binaries and run on bare metal.

That being said, Temporal backend consists of a few stateless and horizontally scalable services (matching service, frontend service etc). Because these roles experience load differently it often makes sense to scale them separately. Due to this design, users often find it convenient to use an orchestration solution such as Kubernetes, ECS etc. HashiCorp themselves run our technology using Nomad to directly answer your question.

The only thing we are strongly opinionated about is that you run the underlying database in a production-grade manner. Throwing a MySQL container into a helm chart isn't going to cut it for serious usage.