What is the core rule for separating Workflows and Activities?

Workflows should only contain orchestration logic and decision-making and must be deterministic. Activities handle all external interactions like API calls, database writes, and network requests.

How does this skill handle distributed transaction failures?

It utilizes the Saga pattern with compensating actions, where each successful step registers a corresponding undo action that runs in reverse order (LIFO) if a failure occurs later in the process.

Why is determinism critical in workflow orchestration?

Orchestrators like Temporal use event replaying to restore state after a crash. If the code is non-deterministic (e.g., using random numbers or system time), the replay would diverge from the original execution, causing failures.

When should I avoid using workflow orchestration?

Orchestration is overkill for simple CRUD operations, stateless request/response APIs, or high-volume real-time streaming data that is better handled by tools like Kafka.

Workflow Orchestration Patterns

Name: Workflow Orchestration Patterns
Author: HermeticOrmus

byHermeticOrmus

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API Development

Design and implement resilient distributed systems using Temporal workflow patterns, saga logic, and state management best practices.

This skill provides expert architectural guidance for building durable, distributed systems using the Temporal orchestration engine. It helps developers navigate the critical distinction between deterministic orchestration logic (Workflows) and non-deterministic external interactions (Activities), while providing implementation patterns for complex scenarios like the Saga pattern for distributed transactions and human-in-the-loop callbacks. By following these patterns, you can ensure that your long-running processes are automatically recoverable, scalable, and maintainable across microservice boundaries.

Key Features

01Design patterns for separating orchestration logic from external side effects

02Strategies for parallel execution using fan-out/fan-in and child workflows

03Best practices for maintaining workflow determinism and state persistence

04Implementation guides for the Saga pattern with compensating actions for rollbacks

05Advanced failure recovery configuration including retry policies and activity heartbeats

060 GitHub stars

Use Cases

01Orchestrating multi-step distributed transactions like payment processing or order fulfillment

02Implementing human-in-the-loop workflows requiring manual approvals and escalations

03Managing long-running entity lifecycles such as user account states or inventory tracking

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add hermeticormus/floreserlife workflow-orchestration-patterns

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill