DBOS is amazing when it comes to Durable Workflows. There are others in the space - the most popular one being Temporal but I argue, Temporal is also the most complicated one. I often say Temporal is like Kubernetes while DBOS is like `docker compose`. (and for those taking me literally, you can use DBOS in Kubernetes!)

I don't realize why DBOS is not nearly as popular as Temporal but it has made a world of difference building Durable Queues and Long Running, Durable Workflows in Python (it supports other languages too).

As they show in this article, Postgres scales impressively well (4 billion workflows per day, on a db.m7i.24xlarge, enough for most applications), which is why, if you have your PostgreSQL backup/restore strategy knocked out and dialed in, you should really take a close look at DBOS to handle your cloud agnostic or self hosted Durable Queues and Durable Workflows. It's an amazing piece of software founded by the original author of Ingres (precusor to Postgres - the story of DBOS itself is captivating. I believe it started from being unable to scale Spark job scheduling)

▲

lelandbatey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The reason that DBOS isn't as popular is because it's younger. DBOS launched in the form we know it in 2024. Temporal is much older; Temporal is technically a fork of Cadence and Cadence released originally in 2017, with Temporal forking and releasing back in 2020. When all three are trying to be "the same sort of thing" and that thing is new, it's hard to show up 7-8 years after the trailblazers and say "oh yeah, we're clearly better" when the existing thing works and is used by tons of folks.

▲

cyberpunk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Temporal is a dumpster fire, they've gotten so much VC funding (recently had D, 300M at a 5bn valuation) with ... nothing to build except ways to trap customers into their SAAS.

I give them about a year or two before the wheels fall off, then it's off to Broadcom and friends.

But I could be wrong as now they're not in the 'durable execution' space at all, it's 'durable execution for ai' according to their latest conference.

Got to spend that VC dosh somewhere I suppose, they're certainly not spending it on making a good product.

	▲	tomwheeler 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Temporal employee here. I'm very surprised by your comment. It's true that we recently had a Series D and that VC firms recognize the value of what we do. The Temporal Server software is 100% open source (MIT license: https://github.com/temporalio/temporal/blob/main/LICENSE). It's totally free and you don't even need to fill out a registration form, just download precompiled binaries from GitHub or clone the repo and build it yourself. You can self-host it anywhere you like, no restrictions on scale or commercial usage. We offer SaaS (Temporal Cloud), which customers can choose as an alternative self-hosting, based on their needs. The migration path is bi-directional, so not a trap by any definition. Regarding AI, Temporal is widely used in that space, but that does not negate the thousands of other companies that use Temporal for other things (e.g., order management systems, customer onboarding, loan origination, money movement, cloud infrastructure management, and so on). In fact, our growth in the AI market came about because companies who were already using Temporal for other use cases realized that it also solved the problems they encountered in their AI projects. And to your last point, we've made dozens of enhancements to the product (here's a small sample: https://temporal.io/blog/categories/product-news). I'd encourage you to follow the news from next week's Replay conference (https://replay.temporal.io/) because we'll be announcing many more.
	▲	switchbak an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]