Exploring Temporal’s Mission and AI in Engineering with Preeti Somal

Hey everyone, it's Alan Hummel and we are live, LIVE live in New York City at Platform Con in Person Day here in Midtown Manhattan. You know, platform Cons been going on all week, right? So today's Thursday.

It actually started Monday, and like the last two platform Cons, it's actually a virtual event and there's, I don't know, 35, 40,000 people registered for the virtual event. But what's interesting this year, they did it a little bit last year, but they really expanded this year are the in-person mm-hmm. Uh, platform, Kanyes that kind of blend in to make a hybrid.

So there's, there's one in London, which was earlier yesterday, and of course now today here in New York. Mm-hmm. I am thrilled to introduce you to Preti Soma.

Yeah. Yes. Preti is, uh, SVP engineering at Temporal, one of the, uh, sponsors and exhibitors here today.

And we're gonna talk a little bit about Platform Khan and whatever else we want to talk about. So thanks for joining us, Preti. Thank you for joining us.

Of course. Thank you for having me here. And, uh, having platform com, uh, live in New York City.

Yeah. 'cause I've always wanted to stay on camera, live in New York City. You say live from New York.

Live From New York City. It's Thursday afternoon. Correct.

And this is more exciting than anything else, right? Exactly. Uh, very cool.

I didn't think that's very good. Hello everyone. And, um, yeah, my name is Treaty.

Uh, I have been in engineering for longer than I would admit and have been sort of on the platform journey throughout my career. So I started off, uh, at Oracle building platforms there long before they were called platforms. Uh, spent some time at VMware, um, again, building platforms at Yahoo, which was a ton of fun.

Yahoo was right, Yahoo. In the days Yahoo was where it was happening. Exactly.

And, uh, at Yahoo, I was responsible for both building and running. And so that's where I think I was really hooked. It was sort of my, um, the challenges that, that running platforms at scale with open source and all of the complexities that all the various Yahoo businesses had kind of really hooked me.

Yeah. And, um, from Yahoo, I went to a tiny company called HashiCorp at that time. Absolutely.

No. Um, I had used Packer, grat, and Terraform when I was at Yahoo. And, uh, I was fascinated by this platform shift happening again to sort of the infrastructure as code elements.

And, um, landed in HashiCorp, spent five years there, uh, really building out the product. I've been running engineering throughout. Um, and then went to temporal and as a, as sort of a fun fact, we were using temporal at HashiCorp as well.

Really. I know that. So Part of her platform team at HashiCorp was using temporal and in fact, Terraform Cloud is also using temporal.

Um, and that sort of, you know, temporal was just this really fascinating technology and, uh, kind of brought together a journey of both building and running platforms with like a platform product as well. Love it. So how long have you been at Temporal then?

I've been there for two years. Okay. Yes.

So you left HashiCorp about two years ago. Was that bef That was before the IBM deal, obviously. Correct.

I left about, uh, uh, a year after the IPO took some time off and recharged and, uh, landed at Temporal. Very cool. Right?

Yeah. No, I've, yeah, I knew Mitchell. com Right.

Some of the other sites, we, we've followed the space for a long time. How would you describe Temporal to our audience? Yeah, So temporal is essentially our mission is to shield developers from all of this complexity around running code that cannot fail.

Now, that's a really loaded term, right? Code does fail, but what we do is we make those failures inconsequential. And so what we have found is a developer, a platform engineer who is building something, is spending a lot of their time.

In fact, some studies would say more than 50% of their time building kind of the, the scaffolding around all of the error conditions. And the magic of temporal is that we just do all of that for them, and they just focus on their business logic Sounded. We would think a lot of people would like that.

Yes, Absolutely. And we are seeing that we're an open source, uh, project. Um, our business model is to deliver it as cloud hosted.

And we've seen an incredible amount of adoption. Um, the product market fit is really tremendous, and our ethos has been to build this with the developer at the core of everything we do. And so the attention to detail around the developer experience, uh, is just incredible.

We, we build idiomatic SDKs, uh, we've got six or seven languages as of late. We are seeing Python sort of overtaking all of our other languages pretty quickly. And, uh, we'll talk a bit about ai, I assume, uh, but you know, it's that focus on the developer that has really, uh, resonated and, and we're seeing a lot of adoption.

So when you say you sell it as a hosted cloud, so is it like a, a SaaS multi-tenant hosted cloud service that you offer or you manage it on clouds for clients? Like I wanna run it on AWS We do temporal on AWS wanna run it on Google Cloud. I do temporal on Google Cloud as well.

Yeah. So we, we run the service, um, we run it and customers have the choice to create kind of, we, we, we provide a logical construct called a namespace where your mm-hmm. Your workflow, um, sort of orchestration code runs, and that namespace, uh, customers can run that either in AWS or Google Cloud.

One key thing I wanna mention is that our security model is incredibly elegant because what runs in cloud is, think about it is like the, the brains of the orchestration, the actual code, the SDK code, it runs in your own infrastructure. So we don't actually see any like your Own code. Exactly.

And so that's actually one of the reasons why You, not, you've got the logic out here, but Right. The IP, if you will, is, is exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. And so the, the s stk Id telling it exactly that your code essentially is just waiting for instructions from the cloud around tasks and steps and retries and like all of this logic that makes your code sort of failures be inconsequential. And this security model, the elegance of it, honestly, I think is one of the main reasons as well, you know, first developer focus and second security model that has really helped with the Adoption.

It, it almost turns the, the classic cloud security conundrum on its head, right. Which is, I gotta trust this cloud provider to, to keep my stuff secure. Right?

Right. Because I only, you know, I only see it, it's like I only see the top of the iceberg, right? I don't see the rest of the iceberg under the water.

Right. And, and that traditionally has been a problem in cloud security, right? Absolutely.

So this is saying no, what, what's on the cloud, even if it did get broken into it, is just logic. Exactly. It's no, that's not the, it's not the ip, it's not the data that, It's not the data.

And, uh, you know, the, the, the big thing it also does is because, because customers, developers are outsourcing reliability, to us, it clearly means that the temporal system itself must be really, really reliable. Right? And so what we wanted to do is make sure we don't burden customers with running like this reliable service that has stayed at scale.

And so we take that on as on, and it's a, it's a responsibility. We take really seriously our, um, our, our company values are reliable. Mm-hmm.

And developers, developers, developers. And so anytime we have to think about making any trade-offs, you know, reliability is the number one thing. We'll go slow on features, but reliability we never compromise on.

Got it. Um, so we're here at Platform Con. Yes.

This is the, I think the third year for platform Cut. It's obvious why temporal I think would say, Hey, platform engineering's probably a good vertical, right? Because it's a good target audience, but what, what, you know, at some point rubber meets the road and reality meets.

Mm-hmm. Conjecture, conjecture. What, what has been your experience for the at Platform Khan?

Yeah, It's my first time, and honestly, it's great. First and foremost, I think just the sheer number of people, the community, the, the questions coming up, the sharing of lessons learned, all of those pieces. You know, I, I'm so glad that I understand this is the first time in New York City.

I'm so glad that the conferences come here and, uh, you know, there is sort of a venue to actually sort of engage and talk about a variety of topics and mm-hmm. Also, it's clear that, you know, platform engineering is sort of continuing to be challenged. Like, one of the things I've seen in my career is like the bar just keeps getting raised on platform engineering, and I think it's high time that there was sort of a, a conference and a venue sort of dedicated to how that bar is shifting at the moment as well.

Right. You know what I find interesting? I'm of an age, right?

Like you said, you've been in this longer than you can, you talk to a lot of the people here and they'll tell you, well, platform engineering's new mm-hmm. Relatively new thing, right? Yes.

DevOps wasn't scaling and cloud native, and, and we needed platforms. Right? Well, you and I both know, we, we've had platforms, right?

For a very, very long time. Right. Where does old meet new, new meat olds here, right?

Is is, I mean, look, I, I remember being a young person, younger person, and some older people would tell me, oh, there's nothing new under the sun. Right? There are things change, there is new, there is innovation, but how much of what you see in here at the platform engineering at Platform Comp, Right, In what you do every day at temporal represents sort of really new, or is it, let's call it evolution.

Yeah. Built on what you've been doing for a while now. Yeah, That's a great question.

Um, you know, fun fact, when I was at Yahoo back in 2013, the name of the organization I was part of was called Platforms Really. Right? And this organization, my boss reported directly into Marissa, who was the CEO at that time, right?

So even back in 2013, this concept of platforms and platforms being kind of at the same hierarchy as other functional organizations existed, right? Mm-hmm. Now, I think for me personally, I, um, I tend to look about at like, what are the problems and how we're solving them.

I tend not to get caught up too much on like the, the terminology. So I'm not an idealist in that sense. Right?

Right. And I think in terms of the, where does old meet new, um, I feel like especially at this moment in time where we are seeing like another technology shift happening and, you know, how does, for instance, AI help with platform engineering? And it's, but the old part here is it's the same pattern.

It's not going to mean platform engineering isn't relevant. It just means that the work we do is at a level that is higher. Mm-hmm.

You know, similar to, for instance, looking at Terraform, it was, you went from shell scripts to GUIs to AS code, right? And, and that was, you were solving similar problems, maybe a different scale, but the technology made your life easier. Yeah.

And I think that is what, where the, the same old patterns kind of continue. Yeah. How does platform engineering's life become easier?

How do you look at higher level constructs that abstract out some of the more repetitive things you were doing? To me, that's been like a common thread across all these years. Right?

Agreed. You mentioned AI briefly, right? No, you just in passing look, a AI's in influence and, and, and disruption is profound.

Right? Right. And I do mean disruption.

It, it's, it's more, uh, real in some areas than other areas. Right. Eventually, I think it'll be across the board, but today it's up and down, it's spotty in terms of platform engineering and what you're seeing in temporal, how is ai, is it really having an effect yet?

Yes. And if not went, Um, I think I, I think, I think there's a couple parts to that question. Um, one is, um, for temporal itself, you know, we are getting a lot of interest from existing customers and nuance that have like AI initiatives going on.

And the main reason why this is happening is, you know, at the core of it, when you think about building an application on ai, you orchestration is like a very core component. Handling failures, stringing together LLMs and tools. You know, these are like the constructs that a workflow in an orchestration engine solves.

And Temporal has had the privilege of solving that for years in like a production battle tested environment. So one category of things we are seeing is definitely more and more adoption of temporal in building AI, because those four constructs around orchestration are very relevant on the other side of the house. Um, the second part is on platform engineering.

There's a couple interesting things. One is we ourselves are experimenting with using AI for things like run books. Mm-hmm.

And you know, like just, um, there's a certain number of repetitive things that AI would be great at. Absolutely. Let's do that.

And, and that's where we are seeing some, some really interesting sort of patterns emerging and we're seeing value. And then I think the third part of it is I, uh, have seen some sort of, uh, new companies popping up around using AI for observability. Oh, yeah.

Right. Well, even the established observability companies are using It. Correct.

Correct. And so I think that's an area, uh, that will mature. And I'm sure we'll see more and more value for platform engineering coming out of the, the package tools.

But I would encourage folks to actually even just play with like, you know, the, the code gens or the document, like one, one kind of oldest new thing that has not changed is finding information. Where do platform engineers, like you go to a company and an on-call engineer needs to find something, uh, there is information sprawl everywhere. That is a use case that ai, That's an amazing use case.

Perfect. Right? Absolutely right.

Hierarchy of the whole thing. Right. You know, I, I had a conversation with someone earlier, it was via Zoom, was it mm-hmm.

Person, but they were talking about AI doing this and AI doing that. And I, I told them, one of the lessons I've learned is mm-hmm. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Right. And I think that that will be a sign of the e the maturity right. Of AI is that you, you pick the right use cases where it shines.

Exactly. Don't try to just AI everything. Right.

Because then you're gonna have failures. And then the people will start saying, oh, this doesn't work. This is a lot of hype.

It's not, doesn't live up to it. Well, no, it's, at the end of the day, it's, it's still sort a tool. Right.

And you gotta use the right tool for the right, for the job. Yes, exactly. And, and that something that, you know, I think would be, we'd all do well to remember it may not do everything Right.

Doesn't have to find the right Fit. Absolutely. And experiment.

And I'll share another, uh, fun fact is within engineering, we do like a sprint showcase every two weeks, and it's open to everybody in the company. We've added a section in that sprint showcase around like the experiments with ai I did last week. And it's open to anyone in the company to come in and talk about, you know, what LLM they used, what tool they used, what was the problem, you know, just like Absolutely.

We're building those learning circles. And, uh, it's been amazing to hear about like, just some of the ideas people are coming up with. This has spawned more creative juicy Right.

Into ideas than Right. Anything I remember since the internet going commercial. Right.

But again, I think we'll have to see where, where that comes down. Yep. We're almost out of time for uhhuh.

You know what we didn't mention? Yes. The temporal website.

Yes. io is our website, and as I mentioned earlier, we are an open source project. Uh, we have a community Slack going.

We also have, um, whoops. Are you, don't worry about it. Okay.

Uh, and of course, GitHub, you know, check us out on GitHub, right. com/temporal. Temporal io.

Temporal io. Yep. There you go.

Priti, I want to thank you for sharing and our experience here at Platform Con. Keep up the great work. We'd love to, you know, we do this a lot, not just in person.

Uhhuh, anytime you want to talk, let us know. Great. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. Brittany Soer, SVP Engineering at Temporal.

We're live in New York. A platform con enjoy. Thank you.