Transforming Network Automation with Temporal#

Naveen Achyuta

• Why: Durable-execution workflow engines are how other industries solved long-running, failure-prone, stateful orchestration — exactly what network change automation is. Temporal is underused in networking and this is a solid architectural introduction.
• What: An introduction of Temporal to network automation: architecture, why durable execution fits network use cases (provisioning, config management, automated remediation, human-in-the-loop), and how it compares to what teams hand-roll today.
• How: Tasks are ordinary code ("activities") whose state is persisted by the Temporal service (history service shards, matching service task queues, distributed workers) — workflows are guaranteed to run to completion, resuming where they left off after failures, with built-in tracing and audit trails. The slides show a practical trigger path (NetBox webhook → workflow) and per-step timing for optimization, plus a GitHub starter repo. Explicit caveat given: don't use it for simple tasks; it earns its keep at scale and resiliency requirements.
• Where applicable: General-purpose; the main adoption constraint is running another stateful service well, which small teams may find heavy.