A hands-on guide to building a resilient platform control plane using Temporal's Entity Workflow pattern. Covers modeling each managed infrastructure resource as a long-running Workflow, handling messages via Updates/Signals/Queries, serializing side effects in a main loop, managing Event History growth with Continue-as-New, and implementing saga-style compensation for multi-step operations like database scaling. Includes Python SDK code examples, a comparison of when to use Activities vs. Child Workflows, and a production design checklist covering idempotency, state size, observability, and security.
Table of contents
From scripts to Workflows #The Entity Workflow pattern #Message handling: Updates, Signals, and Queries #The main loop: Serialize side effects in one place #Handling long-running Workflows with Continue-as-New #Interacting with Entity Workflows #Error handling and compensation #Activities, methods, and Child Workflows: When to use each #Production design checklist #Putting it all together #Wrap-up #94 Impressions