Back in 2019, JD, Spiral Scout’s co-founder and CTO, was building his own workflow engine (like most engineers who have had similar thoughts that building and maintaining a workflow engine was a good idea). While he was starting to build this engine, he was researching different solutions on the market to get some ideas and approaches. JD stumbled upon Temporal.io which immediately caught his attention as a very similar idea to what he was looking to build to handle workflow automation at scale. Temporal’s solution was the silver bullet he needed to solve some of his more complex challenges and he could leave the support and maintenance of the workflow engine to Temporal. Never missing a chance to talk to other extremely smart engineers and entrepreneurs, JD reached out directly to Temporal’s CEO, Maxim on X, and their first conversation laid the groundwork for a friendship and partnership between the 2 businesses that continues to this day.
Early Days and Formation of the Partnership
Spiral Scout has always had a fairly big presence in the PHP open-source community, developing a high-performance PHP framework and numerous tools for PHP and Golang since 2010. JD brought up the idea of creating a PHP SDK for Temporal with Maxim that Spiral Scout would help them create and be it’s caretaker.
The idea of the PHP SDK was to bring Temporal's technology to the PHP language and community. We both believed that the SDK would allow developers to forget about managing their own workflow engines and build more complex projects in a much shorter amount of time. Once engineers saw the solution we knew that it would be game changing for PHP engineers working on workflow-related projects.
Understanding the Temporal Partner Ecosystem
Writing their PHP SDK not only opened our eyes to what Temporal could do but also opened the door for Spiral Scout to become one of the first official Temporal consulting and professional services partners in 2023. In addition, we got to work on or consult on some of their core internal projects so we could learn firsthand the many pros within the engine and what use cases we wanted to avoid. We saw early on that there would be a need for in-depth Temporal expertise within our agency.
Core Services and Technical Synergy
As a partner, Spiral Scout offers a few different types of professional services around Temporal Cloud, which include:
- Expert Consultancy to jumpstart your understanding of Temporal and train your engineering team
- Adding experienced Temporal engineers, i.e., hands-on keyboard engineer who helps pair program with your team members
- The development of custom solutions using Temporal as the backbone.
- Testing
- Support and Maintenance
We have built a number of projects internally using Temporal or have assisted businesses and developers with work specifically focusing on:
- Solution architecture planning
- Modernizing existing applications with Temporal
- Migrating applications from legacy workflow and orchestration tools or self-managed Temporal to Temporal Cloud
- Building new features or applications with Temporal
Since the PHP SDK was developed by our team, and we have made a number of code and architecture contributions to Temporal’s core tech, we have seen a ton of different use cases and can handle almost every aspect of workflow integration and design if you are thinking about using Temporal Cloud, including building AI software solutions like Wippy framework that uses Temporal as the backbone and is an AI agentic framework. JD is actually going to be speaking about using Temporal and AI Agents when building AI solutions at Replay in the Fall of 2024 in Seattle (hint, hint get your tickets, and you can find more details about his session here: A Practical and Tactical Approach to Temporal and AI).
We’ve spent the last five years training our Temporal engineering team with real-world customer experience and working on our internal projects, so we feel extremely comfortable assisting with migrations to the Temporal Cloud, advising on the best practices for workflow design and orchestration with Temporal, or writing the actual code to help our customers do it. Feel free to check out the full range of our services for Temporal and get in touch with us to discuss your needs.
Learn more about the Temporal Partner Ecosystem here.
Key Milestones in our Temporal Partnership
<2019> – Connected with Temporal CEO
<2020- present> – Developed PHP SDK for Temporal
<2023> – Launched Wippy on top of Temporal
<2024> – Became official Temporal Partner
<2024> – Completed 15 Temporal based projects
<Sept 2024> – Sponsor and Speaking at Temporal Replay conference in Seattle
Temporal Benefits to the Clients and Industry
It may take a bit to understand all the benefits, but once you do, it’s hard to go back to something else. Companies choose Temporal for its reliable foundation, which allows for the easy and reliable description and execution of complex and long processes.
Engineers have enough complexities in their daily work that Temporal helps by significantly eliminating a chunk of problems when trying to manage the issues around large scale software. Temporal's durability, fault tolerance, and integration capabilities make it the best and most battle-tested solution on the market for proper scale and orchestration of AI workloads. I sometimes describe it’s capabilities as “bringing a nuclear bomb” to a playground fight, in terms of how much having Temporal in your arsenal can help you win over your competition and a problem you are trying to solve.
Temporal stands out against and above its predecessors for its orchestration and management capabilities, especially when compared to more traditional workflow engines or building your own. Many of the top engineers at Temporal came from backgrounds doing this type of work at other companies.
