Migrating a Monolithic Cloud with Temporal

Migrations are hard. Migrating a large, monolithic application spanning 1000+ engineers is harder. Salesforce at-large is in the middle of a transformation to deliver all products and solutions on Hyperforce. Marketing Cloud – one of the Salesforce’s earliest acquisitions – is a massive multi-tenant application that spans dozens of teams, which presents significant challenges when it comes to moving to a new environment.

At Replay 2024, Salesforce presented on how we deliver Temporal at scale across the company. Over the past year, more critical work has been built on the platform. In this talk we’ll cover one of the most important use cases that was delivered: a cross-substrate migration system.

This talk will cover Temporal’s role in how we migrated a monolithic service across substrates - using Temporal to orchestrate workers in different substrates, for instance - and how we plugged-in and coordinated many different teams into the process. Finally, we’ll also discuss what Temporal learnings we’ve had along the way.