Multi-Stage Temporal Workflows#

The HelloWorkflow from Temporal Go Workflow Basics calls one activity and returns. Real workflows are not that simple. A deployment pipeline provisions infrastructure, configures networking, deploys the application, runs health checks, and updates DNS. Each step depends on the previous one. Any step can fail. Some failures require undoing earlier steps.

This article covers the patterns you need for production multi-stage workflows: sequential activities with data passing, retry policies, timeouts, child workflows, error propagation, and compensation.

Container Lifecycle Workflow#

This article builds a complete Temporal workflow that manages Docker container lifecycle operations: inspect a container, stop it if running, create a snapshot (commit), and handle failures by restarting the container. It demonstrates every pattern from Multi-Stage Temporal Workflows in a concrete, runnable example.

The full source is in the companion repo under container-lifecycle/.

The Use Case#

You need to automate container maintenance: take a snapshot of a running container for backup or migration purposes. The sequence is: