From RPC to transactions and durable executions

I spent some time reading about “Durable Execution Engines” (eg: Temporal) and explored possible connections to earlier concepts like database transactions, distributed transactions, and building RPC/Microservice based systems in a fault tolerant manner. In this post I’ll try to summarize some of my learnings. How useful it is will depend on how much of this you already know! Among other things, I relied on these great overviews: The Modern Transactional Stack (by some a16z folks) and What is Durable Execution?. What’s fascinating about this topic is that both the problem domain and the solution space are quite large and thus offer a range of options. A simple place to start is this talk called Six Little Lines of Fail by Jimmy Bogard, from many years back. He gives a compelling example of how writing even a single small function that updates a database, then sends an email and a separate message to an event bus, is full of pitfalls. Any of those parts could fail, you might have to re ... Read full article.