Temporal has made Standalone Activities generally available, adding a way to start top-level Activity Executions directly from a Client rather than through a Workflow.
The company announced the news in a post on X, positioning the feature as a "job queue for background work." Temporal said jobs are recorded before they reach a Worker, retried under policy, and retain their status, errors and result in one place.
Starting an Activity directly from a Client lets developers run the job "without using a Workflow," according to Temporal’s documentation. The documentation calls Standalone Activities “the simplest way to run durable, retryable background jobs on Temporal.”
The feature is available in Temporal Cloud and on self-hosted Temporal Server version 1.31.0 or later, using Temporal CLI version 1.7.0 or later. Start Delay, Request Cancel, Terminate and Delete are generally available. Pause, Unpause, Reset and Update Options, along with batch operations, remain in Public Preview. Quickstart guidance covers Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, Ruby and Rust.
Temporal said in a blog post that Coinbase migrated a portion of its daily background jobs to Standalone Activities with "zero downtime and zero job loss." The company described the portion as roughly 25% of an estimated 200 million to 600 million daily jobs; the figures are Temporal’s own account of the migration.
Temporal Technologies was founded in 2019 by CTO Maxim Fateev and CEO Samar Abbas, who previously worked together at Amazon Web Services and Uber, where they built the Cadence workflow engine that inspired Temporal. The Bellevue, Washington company offers an MIT-licensed platform for durable workflow execution and says it processes 1 trillion monthly actions for more than 2,900 customers, including Stripe, Datadog, Netflix and Snapchat.
Go Big News reported on September 20 that Temporal raised a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation.
