Temporal has launched Standalone Activities in Public Preview, enabling durable background job processing without the overhead of building and maintaining a custom job queue system. Activities can now run independently outside of Workflows, with built-in retries, exponential backoff, heartbeating, deduplication, lifecycle control, and observability via the Temporal UI and OpenMetrics. Supported across Go, Python, .NET, Java, and TypeScript SDKs, Standalone Activities are available immediately on Temporal Cloud and the latest self-hosted server release. A key advantage is the seamless upgrade path: the same Activity code used as a standalone job can later become a step in a multi-step Workflow without any rewrite.
Table of contents
What are Standalone Activities? #Why this matters #What's included in Public Preview #Getting started #What’s next #40 Impressions