Feedback: everybody’s question is going to be on why this over temporal? I’ve noticed you answered a little bit of that below. My advice would be to write a detailed blog post maybe on how both the systems compare from installation to use cases and administration, etc - I’ve been following your blog and while I think y’all are doing interesting stuff I still haven’t wrapped my head around how exactly is restate different from temporal which is a lot more funded, has almost every unicorn using them and are fully permissively licensed.
That blog post should exist, agree. Here is an attempt at a short answer (with the caveat that I am not an expert in Temporal).
(1) Restate has latencies that to the best of my knowledge are not achievable with Temporal. Restate's latencies are low because of (a) its event-log architecture and (b) the fact that Restate doesn't need to spawn tasks for activities, but calls RPC handlers.
(2) Restate works really well with FaaS. FaaS needs essentially a "push event" model, which is exactly what Restate does (push event, call handler). IIRC, Temporal has a worker model that pulls tasks, and a pull model is not great for FaaS.
Restate + AWS Lambda is actually an amazing task queue that you can submit to super fast and that scales out its workers virtually infinitely automatically (Lambda).
(3) Restate is a self-contained single binary that you download and start and you are done. I think that is a vastly different experience from most systems out there, not just Temporal. Why do app developers love Redis so much, despite its debatable durability? I think it is the insanely lightweight manner they love, and this is what we want to replicate (with proper durability, though).
(4) Maybe most importantly, Restate does much more than workflows. You can use it for just workflows, but you can also implement services that communicate durably (exactly-one RPC), maintain state in an actor-style manner (via virtual objects), or ingest events from Kafka.
All execution and communication is async, durable, reliable. I think that kind of app would be very hard to build with Temporal, and if you build it, you'd probably be using some really weird quirks around signals, for example when building the state maintenance of the digital twin that don't make this something any other app developer would find really intuitive.
Thanks for the detailed answer - please turn it into a blog post! Excited to see competition and different architectural approaches to tackle durable execution. Wishing you all the very best!
100% agree! Bartosz Ciechanowski along with Amit Patel are national treasures. Their expository writing coupled with ChatGPT do dig into some of the more salient points has been a complete game charger for my self learning.
And I believe this strategy was how Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google. He oversaw the chrome project in the early days and its incredible success catapulted him up the management ladder at Google.
