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Standalone Activity

SUPPORT, STABILITY, and DEPENDENCY INFO

Standalone Activities are available as a Pre-release feature in Temporal Cloud and in a special release of the Temporal CLI.

See limitations below.

What is a Standalone Activity?​

A top-level Activity Execution that is started directly by a Client, without using a Workflow, is called a Standalone Activity.

If you need to orchestrate multiple Activity Executions, then you should use a Workflow. But if you just need to execute a single Activity, then you can use a Standalone Activity. This will result in fewer Billable Actions in Temporal Cloud than using a Workflow to run a single Activity. If your Activity Execution is short-lived, then you will also notice lower latency, since there are fewer worker round-trips than when executing the Activity in a Workflow.

Standalone Activities support the same retry policies and timeouts as Workflow Activities, and you write your Activity Functions in the same way for both. In fact, an Activity Function can be executed both as a Standalone Activity and as a Workflow Activity.

Use cases​

Standalone Activities can be used for durable job processing use cases such as sending an email, processing a webhook, syncing data, or executing a single function reliably with built-in retries and timeouts.

Key features​

  • Execute any Temporal Activity as a top-level primitive without the overhead of a Workflow
  • Native async job processing model: schedule -> dispatch -> process -> result
  • No head-of-line blocking - a slow job doesn’t block the dispatch of other Tasks
  • Arbitrary length jobs with heartbeats for liveness and checkpointing progress
  • At-least-once execution by default with native retry policy and timeouts
  • At-most-once execution if retry max attempts is 1
  • Addressable - get an Activity ID / Run ID and get the result, cancel, and terminate
  • Deduplication - with conflict policy: (USE_EXISTING, …), reuse policy: (REJECT_DUPLICATES, …)
  • Separate ID space from Workflows - Standalone Activities are a different kind of top-level execution
  • Priority and fairness - multi-tenant fairness, weighted priority tiers, and safeguards against starvation of lower-weighted tasks
  • Visibility - list Activity Executions and view status, retry count, and last error
  • Manual completion by ID (or token): ignore activity return and wait for external completion
  • Activity metrics - including counts for success, failure, timeout, and cancel
  • Dual use - execute Activities within a Workflow or standalone with no Worker code changes

Pre-release limitations​

The pre-release of Standalone Activities is recommended for experimental use only and has some known limitations.

General limitations:

  • Not suitable for production use cases during Pre-release
  • Delete, pause, reset, and update options are not supported yet
  • TerminateExisting conflict policy and TerminateIfRunning reuse policy are not supported yet
  • Heartbeat timeout must be explicitly set by the caller if using heartbeats in an Activity definition, otherwise it will fail immediately

Temporal Cloud limitations:

  • Standalone Activities are free for evaluation purposes during Pre-release, so we reserve the right to limit usage if it exceeds a reasonable amount
  • 1 day max retention for Standalone Activities
  • We recommend enabling Standalone Activities on a new namespace for dev/test experimental use only

Temporal CLI support​

A special release of the Temporal CLI supports Standalone Activities during Pre-release:

  • The temporal activity subcommand supports Standalone Activities with commands including: start, result, and list
  • Temporal Dev Server has Standalone Activities enabled by default in this special CLI release for local testing

Temporal Cloud support​

Contact your account team to enable Standalone Activities in Temporal Cloud as a Pre-release feature.

Get started​

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