Temporal Workflow Example: Container Lifecycle Management with Docker

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: