What is the difference between a Workflow and an Activity?

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

When should I use this skill?

Use this skill when designing long-running processes, distributed transactions, or complex microservice orchestration requiring high reliability and automatic state persistence.

How does this skill handle distributed transactions?

It utilizes the Saga pattern, where each execution step has a corresponding compensation action that runs in reverse order if a failure occurs, ensuring system consistency.

Why is determinism required for Temporal workflows?

Temporal relies on replaying workflow code to restore state after a failure; if the code is non-deterministic (like using random numbers or system time), the state could become inconsistent during replay.

Workflow Orchestration Patterns

Name: Workflow Orchestration Patterns
Author: Microck

byMicrock

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Cloud Infrastructure

Designs durable, distributed workflows using Temporal to ensure resilience and consistency across complex microservice architectures.

This skill provides comprehensive guidance on architecting reliable distributed systems using Temporal's orchestration engine. It helps developers implement critical design patterns like Sagas for distributed transactions, handle state management with automatic persistence, and enforce strict determinism within workflow logic. Whether building long-running business processes, complex infrastructure automation, or human-in-the-loop systems, this skill ensures your architecture remains resilient, scalable, and easy to recover from failures by clearly separating orchestration from execution.

Key Features

01Implements Saga patterns with automatic compensation logic for distributed transactions

02Enforces strict workflow determinism to ensure reliable state machine execution

03Manages long-running entity lifecycles using Actor-model-inspired patterns

04Configures robust retry policies and activity heartbeats for resilient failure handling

0589 GitHub stars

06Distinguishes orchestration logic (Workflows) from side-effect execution (Activities)

Use Cases

01Automating multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD pipelines

02Managing long-term business processes like subscription billing or approval chains

03Coordinating complex, multi-step checkout and payment processes in e-commerce

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add microck/ordinary-claude-skills workflow-orchestration-patterns

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill