Comment by lll-o-lll
2 days ago
> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day, you're going to spend millions on infra, and it's still going to absolutely suck.
Where are the “millions” on infra going? It’s a handful of services and a Postgres?
> Their sales team is also absolutely appalling and desperate.
You said “on-prem”. It’s open source; why are you dealing with their sales team?
> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day…
If “millions” were required to obtain such tiny scale, I’d agree there’d be a massive problem. No one would use Temporal; it would be a complete waste of resource. If this were true.
We also hit scaling problems with temporal.
Postgres doesn't scale at all four our workload, so you're into cassandra.
For a medium sized deployment, you're looking at 200+ vcpus, and then lets say standard dev/uat/prod. So now you're at 600 cpus. Now you need two geographic regions, dev can stay in one place, so now you're at 800. Want a failover cluster for prod? Have another 200 cpus.
and 200 CPUs is a medium deployment, assuming something like 36 cpus per cassandra node, then say 4-8 per instance of matching, worker, history, frontend. Then all your other components around it, ingress controller, service mesh, etc.
There's a million a year easy, for a small deployment.
Our prod one is 4x this size.
Not a couple hundred in one day, a couple hundred being started, concurrently, every second in a day. Each with ~200 events.
We need a 12 node cassandra cluster for this, with 64cpu nodes. So no, it's not a couple of services and a postgres.
Sales team, as we are an enterprise, and they want to extract money from us.
We’re all enterprise.
If you have 200 WF’s/sec each with 200 events, it sounds to me that you have a sizeable amount of work flowing through this system. 17 million workflows per day? Can I call these transactions?
Do these transactions add value to your business? Do you need durable execution for all these workloads?
Temporal is just a tool; and like any tool it can be misused. For the classic “book a hotel + airline, handle the partial failures” case, 17 million bookings a day would imply you should be thrilled with Temporal.
If you are using it to perform WAF in a firewall; you would be less thrilled. The scale you are describing, and that you aren’t super excited about the incredible amount of money pouring in, makes me question if the use-cases are fitting the tool.
The same with any "open-source" enterprise ($$$) software. It sucks to run yourself. Docs on running/errors are non-existent. Their helm charts are broken. Instead of degraded performance, it just fails.
Yeah, they've had so much VC cash pumped in lately they really need to pump the SAAS side of the business.
With all due respect – if that’s the attitude, you have no business running anything on-prem. And that’s fine, there’s a reason the various cloud providers are the go-to for many businesses.
It's not an attitude, it's an opinion that comes from experience. Operational burden/overhead is a real thing. Just like knowing that German cars will cost $$$ in maintenance. It doesn't mean I shouldn't drive.