At Replay this year we hosted over 40 talks, and one of the most anticipated was our Product Keynote, which was presented by Samar (our CTO and co-founder) and Preeti (our SVP of Engineering). The video of this talk is now available to view on our Replay Rewind site.

We rolled out a few product updates during the keynote. Some of which are previews of upcoming releases and some generally available. Regardless of release availability, each was accompanied by a working demo from Yimin and Liang from our engineering team. The features we spoke through are below.

Native Temporal Monitoring in Datadog

We welcomed our friends at Datadog to join us during the keynote to roll out a (yet another) new feature that provides native monitoring of Temporal within Datadog. They now provide an out of the box dashboard and a handful of recommended monitors that give you a great starting point for running your own Temporal servers. They also announced the release and spoke through a native Datadog tracing library for our Go SDK.

Temporal Updates: Versioning, Schedules, Workflow Update, Multi-region cloud and more.

We continued the keynote with some of our own product announcements and demos, rolling out five new features across the project and within our managed service, Temporal Cloud. The key updates included:

• Workflow Update (public preview)

  Workflow Update is the first new primitive added to Temporal in quite a while. This key capability eliminates development friction and reduces latencies for your responsive applications. In the past, if you wanted to interact with a Workflow, you would send data to it and then you would have to query the Workflow to get a response. With Workflow Update you can now simply send a request and get data back synchronously. This eliminates blocking on the response and helps you build interactive apps.

• Schedules (public preview)

  The Schedules capability of Temporal is applicable against two challenges; it is an upgrade to traditional Cron utilities and also replaces the existing Temporal Cron Jobs feature. The new Schedules feature provides granular controls for you to schedule Temporal Workflows and run them reliably and on a specified schedule, interval or calendar. It also allows you to manage these workflows with controls to start, backfill, delete, describe, list, pause, trigger, and update their execution.

• Worker Versioning

  Have you ever had to modify logic within a Temporal Workflow in production? Until now, this task was quite complicated and required manual control over versions deployed on explicit workers. With this feature update, Temporal now automates control over Worker Versioning. You simply change your code, and then deploy your Workflow with a new version number. Under the cover, Temporal will direct all new workflow executions to Workers that have the new version and all previous versions will continue on the existing workers.

• Programmatic and Automated User and Account Management

  Over the past few months, we have been busy rethinking and simplifying how you manage and authenticate users within Temporal Cloud. We introduced API Keys and updated the tcloud CLI so that you can automate and programmatically manage user, accounts and namespaces within Temporal Cloud. It allows you to perform a single update or execute these in batch. In the demo,we even showed how you can do all of this as a reliable Temporal Workflow.

• Multi-Region Temporal Cloud: Global Namespaces

  Our final announcement was Global Namespaces for Temporal Cloud. This deployment option, allows you to get a managed service for workloads that need 99.99% availability or global access. If you want to do this with a self-hosted Temporal Server, it requires fairly complex setup and management for replication and traffic failover. With this new feature, this is as simple as choosing a secondary region for Temporal Cloud and we take care of all the complexity. Don’t believe us? Check out the demo!

This was a feature packed keynote and highlighted some of the biggest advances we’ve made over the past few months. Ultimately, We are pretty happy that all the demos went off without a hitch and that much of this is available for you to use now.

If you’d like to see the demos and hear from the team directly, you can check out the video on our Replay Rewind site and join the discussion about these new features in our community slack.