What is the difference between a Workflow and an Activity?

Workflows contain the orchestration logic and must be deterministic, while Activities handle all external interactions like API calls and database writes.

When should I use the Saga pattern in distributed systems?

Use the Saga pattern when you need to manage distributed transactions across multiple services that require compensation (rollback) logic if a step fails.

Why is determinism critical for Temporal workflows?

Temporal relies on replaying code to recover state after failures; if code is non-deterministic (using random() or direct time), the replay will diverge and fail.

How does this skill handle long-running processes?

It implements Async Callback and Signal patterns, allowing workflows to sleep for months or wait for external human approvals without consuming active resources.

Workflow Orchestration Patterns

Name: Workflow Orchestration Patterns
Author: HermeticOrmus

byHermeticOrmus

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API Development

Orchestrates durable, distributed workflows using Temporal for resilient microservices and long-running business processes.

This skill empowers Claude to design and implement robust distributed systems using Temporal orchestration. It provides comprehensive patterns for separating workflow logic from external activities, implementing saga patterns for distributed transactions, and ensuring strict determinism within workflows. By applying these patterns, developers can build scalable, fault-tolerant processes—such as payment flows, order management, and infrastructure automation—that automatically handle failures and state persistence without manual recovery logic.

Key Features

01Implementation of the Saga Pattern with automated compensation logic

02Design guidance for strict Workflow vs. Activity separation

03Determinism enforcement and state management best practices

04Entity workflow patterns for long-lived stateful processes

05Resilience strategies including retry policies and activity heartbeats

060 GitHub stars

Use Cases

01Building multi-step distributed payment and order fulfillment systems

02Orchestrating long-running infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD pipelines

03Implementing human-in-the-loop approval processes with timeouts

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add hermeticormus/hermetic-academy workflow-orchestration-patterns

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill