Strategy for local development using Temporal Cloud

Hey all, we’re finally getting the chance to work on our Temporal Cloud setup, and I wanted to run our local development strategy by the community for feedback.

We have multiple teams, each with multiple engineers, working on multiple apps that will eventually start using Temporal to build workflows. We would like the local development experience to be as frictionless as possible, such that engineers can just spin up their apps via docker-compose and start working with workflows.

Temporalite seems like an option, although we’re already running into resource issues on laptops due to how much stuff needs to be running for some of our systems. We would also prefer to abstract as much of the actual temporal server stuff as possible from the majority of our engineers; we’re thinking that unexpected issues with Temporalite spinning up might derail some folks a bit too much.

So we’re thinking about using our Temporal Cloud instance for local development as well. We need each engineer to have an isolated sandbox to work in, separate from our live environments. We’re thinking about giving each engineer their own namespace, of which they are the admin. This would let us avoid spinning up any local resources for Temporal (besides the worker of course). The biggest downside would probably be that we’d be paying for the actions(is that the right term?) for local development, but I doubt that’s enough traffic to be too significant.

Other than the cost, are there other issues with the Temporal Cloud approach? Are others doing something like this as well? Is there a better alternative? Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide!

1 Like

The Temporal cloud in its current form is tailored for production and integration workloads. It misses features for individual developers. The most crucial missing feature is the ability to delete all data in a namespace quickly. Ideally, you want to wipe out all namespace data in milliseconds with a single command or UI button click. The local development with temporalite or docker-compose does support a very fast full reset of the environment to the clean state.

We really want to make the Temporal Cloud a superb platform for the development phase as well. But it will take some time to implement.

Ahh, that does present a challenge, thanks for calling it out @maxim.