What is the primary difference between a Workflow and an Activity?

Workflows manage orchestration and decision-making and must be deterministic. Activities handle external interactions like API calls or database writes and can be non-deterministic.

Why is determinism critical for workflow orchestration?

Determinism ensures that if a workflow execution is interrupted by a crash, the engine can replay the event history and arrive at the exact same state, ensuring consistency.

When should I avoid using workflow orchestration?

Orchestration is overkill for simple CRUD operations, pure data processing pipelines like Airflow, or high-throughput real-time streaming like Kafka.

How does this skill help with distributed transactions?

It provides patterns for the Saga pattern, which allows you to define compensation steps for every action, ensuring that if a process fails halfway, previous steps are correctly rolled back.

Workflow Orchestration Patterns

Name: Workflow Orchestration Patterns
Author: HermeticOrmus

byHermeticOrmus

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API 开发

Architects durable, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Temporal-inspired workflow patterns and best practices.

关于

This skill equips Claude with the architectural framework needed to design and implement resilient distributed systems. It focuses on the core principles of durable execution, specifically the critical separation between deterministic orchestration logic (Workflows) and non-deterministic side effects (Activities). Users can leverage this skill to implement complex Saga patterns for distributed transactions, manage long-running entity lifecycles, and ensure system reliability through robust retry policies and idempotency. It is particularly useful for developers building microservices that require high consistency, automatic state persistence, and graceful failure recovery.

主要功能

Distributed Saga pattern implementation with compensation logic
Deterministic state management and workflow versioning strategies
Fault-tolerant error handling with custom retry policies
Parallel execution patterns including Fan-Out/Fan-In and Async Callbacks
2 GitHub stars
Temporal-aligned architecture design (Workflows vs. Activities)

使用场景

Orchestrating complex infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD deployment pipelines.
Designing a multi-step e-commerce checkout process with automated payment rollbacks.
Managing long-lived human-in-the-loop approval workflows that span days or weeks.

关于

主要功能

Distributed Saga pattern implementation with compensation logic
Deterministic state management and workflow versioning strategies
Fault-tolerant error handling with custom retry policies
Parallel execution patterns including Fan-Out/Fan-In and Async Callbacks
2 GitHub stars
Temporal-aligned architecture design (Workflows vs. Activities)

使用场景

Orchestrating complex infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD deployment pipelines.
Designing a multi-step e-commerce checkout process with automated payment rollbacks.
Managing long-lived human-in-the-loop approval workflows that span days or weeks.