Durable Workflows on Crafting with Temporal

By Ricky Kirkendall

Many sandboxed use cases involve long-running execution:

• ETL pipelines: Extracting, transforming, and loading data across systems.
• Multi-agent orchestration: Coordinating tasks, handoffs, and dependencies between agents.
• Batch processing: Processing documents, generating reports, and running other jobs in bulk.

Several of our customers have independently decided to implement Temporal for these use cases. Temporal is an open-source platform for durable execution: it records workflow progress so work can resume after a crash or interruption. Three core concepts are useful to understand:

• Activities are individual units of work, such as calling an API, processing a dataset, or running an agent session.
• Workflows define how those activities fit together in code, including their order, branching logic, and what to do when a step fails.
• Workers are the processes that execute workflow and activity code, picking up tasks from Temporal's task queues.

Together, they let you express a process in code while the Temporal Service preserves its history and coordinates execution and retries. In Crafting, workers can run inside a sandbox with access to the code, services, and dependencies your workload needs.

Since Crafting deployments run on our customers' infrastructure, customers are free to implement Temporal in a way that makes sense for their workloads. We wanted to share a few reference architectures below, along with projects we've created to help you get started with each.

Run existing Temporal workflows in Crafting sandboxes

Crafting is now a compute provider in Temporal's sandbox orchestration harness. Workflows can execute commands inside Crafting sandboxes, with support for sandbox lifecycle management, suspend and resume, snapshotting, and forking. This is useful if you already have a Temporal workflow that you want to be powered by the same prod-like sandboxes your dev team already uses.

Explore the Crafting provider

Build Temporal workflows inside Crafting

What if you could set up a fully sandboxed Temporal workflow from an idea in about 15 minutes?

If you're already using Crafting, we want to make it as easy as possible to get started with Temporal workflows. We've created a specialized agent that interviews you about your workload or reviews your existing implementation, then helps you spec out a Temporal workflow based on that input. It writes and tests the workflow and creates a new sandbox template, complete with Temporal's open-source server, Postgres persistence, and an endpoint for the Temporal UI that works out of the box.

Try the Temporal Workflow Builder agent

Orchestrate multiple agents to build and verify changes

Kubernetes interception is one of the most powerful features of Crafting. After an agent completes a round of changes, interception lets it test those changes not only in its own self-contained sandbox but also against a running staging cluster. Splitting that build-and-verify loop across multiple agents adds handoffs and long-running execution, which is exactly what Temporal is built to coordinate.

In this example, an engineering-manager agent hands a feature request to a Temporal workflow that coordinates three agents: a coder that makes the change in a sandbox, a local QA agent that tests it inside the sandbox, and a cluster QA agent that tests it against staging through interception. Temporal records every step and retries failed attempts, sending QA's evidence back to the coder.

The whole demo runs locally on Crafting Express, so you can try it yourself on your own machine.

Explore the multi-agent Temporal example

Happy Crafting.