Temporal.io’s Cornelia Davis

Hi, Spring fans! In this nostalgic, wide-ranging conversation, I revisit my first podcast episode from 2018 with Cornelia Davis and catch up on her career across Pivotal, VMware, Weaveworks, Amazon, Kubernetes, and now Temporal. I reflect on the enduring relevance of cloud-native patterns, workflow engines, and the evolution of software delivery from infrastructure-centric systems to durable execution. Cornelia explains Temporal in depth: an open-source platform for long-running, stateful, asynchronous workflows that preserves execution history so processes can resume exactly where they left off, even after failures or long waits. We cover human-in-the-loop workflows, event sourcing, multi-language SDKs, open source versus cloud, and why Temporal is especially well suited for modern AI and agentic applications. She also highlights the Temporal Agent Harness, strong typing, policy-based approvals, and use cases ranging from enterprise processes to OpenAI-scale agent infrastructure. I close the episode with practical pointers for learning more through Temporal’s website, blog, community resources, and GitHub, plus Cornelia’s preferred online presence on LinkedIn. #temporal #ai #workflows #engineering #pivotal #agents #harnesses #durableexecution