Durable Execution for Real‑World Failures with Temporal’s Cornelia Davis

About this episode

Cornelia Davis discusses durable execution and its application in handling real-world failures in infrastructure and automation.

A lot of infrastructure and automation fails for ordinary reasons: rate limits, flaky networks, partial permissions, long-running jobs, and retries that vanish when the process restarts. Durable execution is a way to design systems that keep going anyway - without rebuilding a maze of queues, cron jobs, and manual cleanup. Cornelia Davis breaks down how durable execution works in practice: writing “normal” code while the runtime provides durable retries, state management, and the ability to pause work, wait for a human or external change (like a quota increase), and resume right where things left off. The conversation connects these ideas to platform engineering realities - Terraform workflows, long provisioning times, and “orphan” resources - and explains how Temporal workflows and activities help teams model failure handling as a first-class part of the system. You’ll also hear why this approach is showing up in AI engineering: long-running agent workflows, frequent rate limiting, and the need to avoid re-running expensive LLM calls when something breaks near the end. Guest: Cornelia Davis , Developer Advocate at Temporal Technologies and author of “Cloud Native Patterns”…

People in this episode

Host: Cory O'Daniel

Guest: Cornelia Davis

Topics covered

• durable execution
• platform engineering
• failure handling
• automation
• AI engineering

Keywords

• durable execution
• infrastructure
• automation
• rate limits
• state management
• AI engineering
• long-running jobs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Temporal Technologies

Books & works: Cloud Native Patterns

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