Temporal best practices for orchestrating a DAG of tasks

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m building a workflow orchestrator on top of Temporal and I’d like to validate whether my current approach aligns with Temporal best practices.

At a high level, I compile a workflow definition into a DAG. From that DAG, I compute an execution order (topological sort). The Temporal workflow then iterates through that order and executes each node using the same activity (ExecuteNode), passing the node ID and a shared execution context.

So conceptually:

  • One Temporal Workflow per execution

  • A DAG representing the workflow topology

  • N nodes in the DAG

  • N executions of the same activity type, each representing a node

For example, if the DAG has 20 nodes, the workflow schedules 20 activity tasks of the same activity type, one per node, sequentially (for now).

My main questions are:

  1. Is this a reasonable way to model a DAG-based workflow in Temporal, or am I fighting the framework?

  2. Would Temporal recommend a different modeling approach (for example, child workflows per node, or distinct activity types per node)?

  3. From an observability and debugging perspective, is having 20 executions of the same activity type a problem? What are the best practices to clearly debug and inspect each node execution (inputs, outputs, failures) in this setup?

  4. Are there any scalability or history-size concerns with this pattern as the number of nodes grows?

Below is a simplified version of the workflow code to give more context. The key part is the loop that executes each DAG node via the same activity.

for _, nodeID := range nodes {
	var result string
	err := workflow.ExecuteActivity(
		ctx,
		ExecuteNode,
		nodeID,
		results, // previous node outputs
	).Get(ctx, &result)

	if err != nil {
		return err
	}

	results[nodeID] = result
}

I’m mostly trying to understand whether this pattern fits well with Temporal’s execution model, and how others would approach debugging and observability for DAG-style orchestrators.

Thanks in advance for any guidance or feedback.

2

Wondering if this is what the Docs call DSL workflows samples-go/dsl at main · temporalio/samples-go · GitHub

Also found this almost 3 year old talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em5ck6qNHLY&t=3s