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title: Serverless Workers: from background jobs to complex agents
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# Serverless Workers: from background jobs to complex agents

**[Temporal](https://daily.dev/sources/temporal)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Temporal Serverless Workers let your code run on AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Run while Temporal Cloud tracks job state and starts workers on demand. A single Lambda invocation can process multiple jobs, and Cloud Run worker pools scale to zero when idle. You can start with a Standalone Activity as a durable background job, then grow it into a full multi-step Workflow for things like document processing or AI agents without rewriting the function. Temporal also supports Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime for agentic apps. Lambda and Cloud Run support are in Public Preview; AgentCore Runtime support is in Pre-release as of October 2026.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://temporal.io/blog/serverless-workers-lambda-cloud-run>

## Questions this post answers

### How does Temporal run workers on AWS Lambda without keeping a fleet running all the time?

Temporal Cloud queues the work and invokes a Lambda worker only when capacity is needed. A single Lambda invocation can process multiple jobs, and the worker exits once available work finishes. This lets a background job queue, such as webhook delivery, scale up during bursts and return to zero between them instead of running an always-on worker fleet.

_Developers wiring serverless compute into durable job queues can track Temporal's Lambda integration details on daily.dev._

### What is the difference between a Temporal Standalone Activity and a Workflow?

A Standalone Activity submits a single function, like a webhook delivery, directly to Temporal as a durable background job without needing a larger Workflow defined around it. A Workflow coordinates multiple dependent Activities, preserving progress between steps and retrying individual Activities, such as a document-processing pipeline that extracts text, calls a model, and produces a report.

_Anyone deciding between a simple job queue and full workflow orchestration can compare these patterns on daily.dev._

### Which cloud compute options support Temporal Serverless Workers and what stage are they in?

Temporal Serverless Workers support AWS Lambda for event-driven jobs, Google Cloud Run Worker Pools for containerized workloads with longer execution times, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime for agentic applications on AWS. As of October 2026, Lambda and Cloud Run support are in Public Preview, while AgentCore Runtime support is in Pre-release.

_Teams evaluating serverless backends for AI agents can follow these preview rollouts on daily.dev._

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Introducing Temporal Serverless Workers: Deploy Temporal Workers to AWS Lambda](https://daily.dev/posts/introducing-temporal-serverless-workers-deploy-temporal-workers-to-aws-lambda-lhywlkbgj) · Temporal · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [Temporal Serverless Workers on Cloud Run worker pools](https://daily.dev/posts/temporal-serverless-workers-on-cloud-run-worker-pools-yuktusfm3) · Google Cloud · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [Temporal reveals serverless option for its Durable Execution platform](https://daily.dev/posts/temporal-reveals-serverless-option-for-its-durable-execution-platform-o3rnnfwsf) · The New Stack · 2 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#gcp](https://daily.dev/tags/gcp), [#serverless](https://daily.dev/tags/serverless), [#aws-lambda](https://daily.dev/tags/aws-lambda)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/serverless-workers-from-background-jobs-to-complex-agents-p1xdtusim)

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