I spent some time reading about “Durable Execution Engines” (eg: Temporal) and explored possible connections to earlier concepts like database transactions, distributed transactions, and building RPC/Microservice based systems in a fault tolerant manner. In a great section titled Distributed Transactions in Practice, the DDIA book concludes, “Distributed transactions thus have a tendency of amplifying failures, which runs counter to our goal of building fault-tolerant systems”! But interestingly, also brings up the idea of distributed transactions, “long lived transactions” (basically what we would call workflows today) and nested transactions.