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Temporal Demo: Infrastructure Provisioning

See HOWTORUN.md for details on environment and dependencies setup.

Purpose

This demo is a simple application an Infrastructure/Platform team might host to simplify application team requests for Cloud Resources. It shows how a team might use Temporal to orchestrate Cloud Resource provisioning by delegating to an Infrastructure-As-Code (IaC) tool like Pulumi.

It is common for Infrastructure teams to use an IaC tool to manage Cloud Resources because of their great state management and dependency resolution features.

Automating failure handling during these updates or orchestrating units of these resources for application team support quickly reveals the need for an orchestrator that can ensure your infrastructure remains in a consistent state.

Caveats

This demo presumes local ability to create and manage AWS Resources. Also, it writes changes to the Pulumi stack configuration in-place. Neither of these are admittedly "production grade" approaches.

Prerequisites __ Features __ Patterns
Network Connection ✅ __ Schedule __ Entity
Golang 1.18+ ✅ __ Local Activity __ Long-Running ✅
NodeJS & NPM ✅ __ Timer ✅ __ Fanout
Temporal CLI ✅ __ Signal ✅ __ Continue As New
Pulumi ✅ __ Query ✅ __ Manual Intervention ✅
AWS Account ✅ __ Update __ Saga
✅ __ Heartbeat ✅ __ Long-polling
__ Retry ✅ __
__ Data Converter __
__ Polyglot ✅ __

Temporal Value Proposition Highlights

Velocity

Polyglot Pragmatism

This project was started as a Golang project but the most relevant Pulumi sample used TypeScript. Targetting a specific TaskQueue from the Golang Orchestration that maps to a hosted TypeScript application kept development humming along without a hitch. No porting or rewrites needed.

Resuming Progress Made Simple

Resuming a use case in response to a Human interaction is non-trivial to build without Temporal. Using Temporal, it's merely a matter of wiring a Signal execution to a known Workflow. Temporal takes care of reloading current state and finding the Workflow without worrying about "which server" is handling the request.

Reliability

Heartbeats

Cloud Resources can take a long time to provision. The built-in support for Heartbeats in long-running activities is simply a configuration parameter to control the rescheduling of Activity executions.

Guaranteed Time Limits

The use of AwaitWithTimeout makes it simple to wait for Human interaction while applying a time limit on their response. There is no more need to continually query persistence for these kinds of time limits to invalidate requests correctly.

Insight

Show Me Why It Broke

Failures encountered in Long-running Activities in any system are hard to diagnose due to log overload. Temporal UI Pending Activities view makes it clear whether there is some connectivity issue or some conflict with refreshing Pulumi state to know where to fix the real problem.

Use Case: Provisioning An Application

The Underlying Applications

Four distinct applications come together to meet this use case.

  1. /internal: (Golang) contains implementation of the Domain, leveraging Temporal Workflow Orchestration to express the use cases.
  2. /provisioning_aws: (TypeScript) contains the AWS-specific activities for provisioning Cloud Resources.
  3. /bff: (Golang) contains the backend API server to support the Single-Page Application (SPA). NOTE that the Temporal SDK Client is used here to Start Workflows.
  4. /ui: (TypeScript) contains the Svelte SPA application teams and infra teams use

See the Makefile for specific commands to run these applications.

Use Case: Product Scope And Requirements

The implementation here only supports AWS but supporting other cloud providers becomes quickly obvious by targeting Temporal Task Queues.

First, the team enters basic information about their application, team, and who they would like to authorize the request for provisioning resources.

app page

The demo then shows what the Authorizer they specified will see.

authorize page

The Authorizer specifies the AWS Region and AWS Profile to use for completing the provisioning request (if approving).

The Authorizer selects to Approve or Reject this request.

An appropriate response page is shown based on their selection.

Use Case Implementation: Staging An Application Provisioning Workflow

When the user Submits the request, a Temporal Workflow is started, performing some initial steps like verifying team identity and other pre-flight checks. The Orchestration is then suspended to await the Authorizer "Approved" or "Rejected" decision. By default, the request will wait for 2 minutes to receive an authorization before canceling the request.

The Golang "domain" code for the Orchestration is found in the /internal/orchestrations directory.

Use Case Implementation: Authorizing An Application Request (Human-in-the-loop)

When the Authorizer has approved this request, the ProvisionApplication Orchestration receives this Temporal Signal to allow the suspended Workflow to make progress. This Signal includes the Authorizer's assignment of AWS region and which Profile to use to execute the Pulumi update.

For simplicity, we opted to merely adapt the Pulumi sample found here to programmatically use Pulumi to deploy an S3 Bucket to AWS.

You might notice this sample is written in TypeScript but our primary Orchestration logic is written in Golang.

Enter Temporal's simple, powerful way to support polyglot applications.

Many organizations must unify disparate languages. Temporal solves this by making it simple to target specific hosts for Activity executions using the TaskQueue activity option. Teams can choose the Right Tool for the Job while retaining the composition every architecture strives for. Temporal supports six languages.

In this demo, we create an "Activity Worker" that hosts the Pulumi automation to be invoked as an Activity by the main Orchestration.

The TypeScript Pulumi application is found in the /provisioning_aws directory.