Glossary Entry

Durable Execution

Running a long process so that its progress is recorded as it goes, letting it resume from where it stopped after a crash, restart, or long wait instead of starting over.

Deployment Architecture

Seed source: Temporal documentation

Workflow engines such as Temporal provide durable execution by logging every step of a workflow, so another process can rebuild its state and continue. The same idea matters for AI agents, whose runs can last hours and whose state compounds: a failure late in a run should cost a retry of one step, not the whole task.

Resuming safely requires that any step which might run twice is idempotent, meaning that repeating it has no extra effect.