--- title: Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase description: A webinar from Temporal and Coinbase covers Temporal's new standalone activities feature, a way to run durable job-queue-style tasks as top-level primitives... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase | daily.dev og:description: A webinar from Temporal and Coinbase covers Temporal's new standalone activities feature, a way to run durable job-queue-style tasks as top-level primitives... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/yWiBLeegx.png og:image:alt: Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase **[Temporal](https://daily.dev/sources/temporal)** · 36 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A webinar from Temporal and Coinbase covers Temporal's new standalone activities feature, a way to run durable job-queue-style tasks as top-level primitives alongside workflows, now in public preview across six SDKs with GA expected in September. Temporal's Phil demos features like start delay, batch operator commands, heartbeating, and full visibility in Temporal Cloud's UI. Coinbase engineer Edward Yu then details how Coinbase is replacing its homegrown background job service (processing 200-600 million jobs/day) with standalone activities, describing the migration architecture, a percentage-based traffic router for zero-downtime rollout, lessons learned (poller counts, soft-failing clients, side-by-side metrics), and their phased migration plan covering delay jobs and eventually cron-style scheduled jobs. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is Temporal's standalone activities feature and when is it becoming generally available? Standalone activities let developers execute any activity as a top-level primitive using the same activity code and worker as workflows, with Temporal durably persisting the job before dispatch. It is in public preview across six SDKs and growing, suitable for production use, with general availability targeted for September including the new start delay capability for non-recurring scheduled jobs of any duration. _daily.dev helps engineers evaluating durable job queue platforms track feature rollouts like this one._ ### Why did Coinbase replace its internal background job service with Temporal standalone activities? Coinbase's homegrown background job service processed 200 to 600 million jobs daily across 186 namespaces but suffered from a single-leader-elected coordinator bottleneck, a noisy neighbor problem on shared retry sets, no web UI for job-level details, and a 10KB payload limit. Standalone activities removed the coordinator entirely, added per-namespace retention, up to 2MB payloads, mTLS, and a UI shared with workflows. _teams weighing a job queue migration can follow real-world tradeoffs like these on daily.dev._ ### How did Coinbase achieve zero downtime when migrating job traffic to Temporal? Coinbase built a router that reads a rollout percentage from dynamic config for each job type on every submission, sending that fraction of traffic to Temporal while the rest stays on the old background job service. Percentages could be adjusted live from 0 to 100 without code changes or redeploys, and if Temporal config was missing or the client failed to start, traffic defaulted safely back to the old system. _engineers planning a gradual system cutover can compare rollout strategies like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Temporal hits 3,000 paying customers with its crash-proof workflow engine](https://daily.dev/posts/temporal-hits-3-000-paying-customers-with-its-crash-proof-workflow-engine-0pq440ota) · The New Stack · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Standalone Activities: Durable job processing, now in Public Preview \#](https://daily.dev/posts/standalone-activities-durable-job-processing-now-in-public-preview--od8qmrnvg) · Temporal · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#coinbase](https://daily.dev/tags/coinbase), [#workflow-orchestration](https://daily.dev/tags/workflow-orchestration) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx"},"datePublished":"2026-08-13T22:01:45.863Z","dateModified":"2026-08-13T22:27:38.890Z","description":"A webinar from Temporal and Coinbase covers Temporal's new standalone activities feature, a way to run durable job-queue-style tasks as top-level primitives...","image":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hrJvyKH-39A/sddefault.jpg","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hrJvyKH-39A/sddefault.jpg","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Temporal","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Temporal","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/65290ca7e3ab46a7b1df76f2757800c2","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/temporal"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"distributed-systems,coinbase,workflow-orchestration","timeRequired":"PT36M","video":{"@type":"VideoObject","name":"Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase","description":"A webinar from Temporal and Coinbase covers Temporal's new standalone activities feature, a way to run durable job-queue-style tasks as top-level primitives...","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hrJvyKH-39A/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2026-08-13T22:01:45.863Z","duration":"PT36M","url":"https://api.daily.dev/r/yWiBLeegx","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hrJvyKH-39A"}} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Temporal","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/temporal"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Building a better job queue with Temporal and Coinbase"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-better-job-queue-with-temporal-and-coinbase-ywibleegx#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What is Temporal's standalone activities feature and when is it becoming generally available?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Standalone activities let developers execute any activity as a top-level primitive using the same activity code and worker as workflows, with Temporal durably persisting the job before dispatch. 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