Overview
Temporal Cloud is a managed Durable Execution platform. Temporal operates the Temporal Service for you: persistence, replication, version upgrades, and availability.
Your Workers stay in your environment. They run your Workflow and Activity code and handle your data, while Temporal Cloud stores Workflow state and schedules the work.
How Temporal Cloud works
Temporal Cloud runs the Temporal Service for your applications:
- Your environment: You run Workers that execute your Workflow and Activity code. Deploy them on Kubernetes, virtual machines, serverless platforms, or on-premises hardware.
- Temporal Cloud: Stores Workflow state and Event History, queues Tasks, and schedules work. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Temporal SDKs: Your applications use an SDK to talk to Temporal Cloud over TLS-encrypted gRPC connections.
Because the two halves scale separately, you size the compute for your Workers and Temporal sizes the orchestration layer.
Architecture
Cell-based infrastructure
Temporal Cloud uses a cell-based architecture to achieve isolation and scalability. Each cell is a self-contained deployment unit with its own:
- Dedicated cloud account and VPC
- Kubernetes cluster running Temporal services
- Primary database with synchronous replication across three availability zones
- Elasticsearch for Workflow visibility and search
- Load balancers and ingress management
- Observability and certificate infrastructure
Cells are failure domains. When infrastructure inside a cell degrades, only the Namespaces in that cell are affected, and cells scale independently of each other.
Data plane and control plane
Data plane: Where your Workflows run. Each cell processes Workflow operations, persists state, and manages Task Queues.
Control plane: Handles provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle operations. When you create a Namespace, the control plane:
- Selects a cell in the region you chose
- Provisions database resources and roles
- Generates and deploys mTLS certificates
- Configures ingress routes and validates connectivity
The control plane runs those steps on Temporal itself.
Multi-cloud availability
Temporal Cloud runs on both AWS and GCP:
- 14 AWS regions spanning North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America
- 6 GCP regions in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific
You can create Namespaces in any supported region. For disaster recovery, replicate across regions within a cloud provider or across the two providers.
See Service regions for the complete list.
Built-in reliability
Every Temporal Cloud Namespace includes baseline high availability:
- Three-zone replication: Workflow state replicates synchronously across three availability zones before a write is acknowledged
- Automatic failover: If one zone becomes unavailable, operations continue on the remaining zones
- 99.9% SLA: Contractual uptime guarantee for standard Namespaces
High Availability features
For workloads that need stronger guarantees, Temporal Cloud offers three replication options:
| Deployment | Description | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| Same-region | Replicate across isolated cells within one region | Single-region applications needing cell-level isolation |
| Multi-region | Replicate across regions within one cloud provider | Geographic redundancy and compliance requirements |
| Multi-cloud | Replicate across cloud providers (AWS ↔️ GCP) | Resilience to a provider-wide outage |
High Availability Namespaces include:
- 99.99% SLA: Contractual uptime guarantee
- Sub-1-minute RPO: Recovery Point Objective for data loss
- 20-minute RTO: Recovery Time Objective for failover completion
- Automatic or manual failover: Choose the failover strategy per Namespace
See High Availability for configuration details.
Security model
Temporal Cloud secures your applications at several layers.
Your code stays with you
Temporal Cloud does not execute your application code. Workers run in your environment and connect to Temporal Cloud over encrypted channels, so access to your compute resources and secrets stays with you.
Client-side encryption
The Data Converter encrypts Payloads before they leave your Workers, so Temporal Cloud stores ciphertext and the data stays encrypted even if the service is compromised. Deploy a Codec Server to decrypt data in the Web UI without sharing keys with Temporal.
Network isolation
- mTLS authentication: Per-Namespace certificate-based authentication for gRPC endpoints
- API key authentication: Alternative to certificates for simpler key management
- Private connectivity: AWS PrivateLink and GCP Private Service Connect for traffic that never traverses the public internet
Compliance
Temporal Technologies maintains SOC 2 Type 2 certification and complies with GDPR and HIPAA regulations. Audit logs capture supported operations in the Temporal Cloud control plane and export to your security monitoring systems. See Audit Logging for the supported operations and coverage.
See Security model for the full model.
Consumption-based pricing
Temporal Cloud bills for what you use.
Actions
Actions are the primary billing unit. Actions are billable operations like starting Workflows, sending Signals, recording Heartbeats, and completing Activities. Pricing starts at $50 per million Actions. Volume and commitment discounts are available on the Business, Enterprise, and Mission Critical plans.
Storage
- Active Storage: Event History for running Workflows
- Retained Storage: Event History for closed Workflows, for a Retention Period you set per Namespace, up to 90 days
Plans
Four tiers—Developer, Business, Enterprise, and Mission Critical—with increasing support levels. The Developer plan starts at $0/month. The Business plan and above add monthly Actions and Storage allocations and commitment discounts. Self-serve signup and plan management available at cloud.temporal.io.
See Pricing for rates and examples.
Move workloads between deployments
Temporal Cloud runs the same Temporal Server as the open-source distribution, so applications built for a self-hosted Temporal Service run on Temporal Cloud without code changes. Point your connection configuration at your Cloud Namespace.
Automated migration uses Workflow replication to move running Workflows from self-hosted to Cloud, or between Cloud regions, with no Workflow restarts, data loss, or downtime. Manual migration updates Clients and Workers to use new Namespace endpoints and lets existing Workflows finish where they are.
The same tooling works in every direction: self-hosted to Cloud, Cloud to self-hosted, and between Cloud regions and providers.
Run Cloud operations yourself
Standard operations need no support ticket:
- Web UI: Create Namespaces, manage users, and configure settings at cloud.temporal.io
- Temporal CLI Cloud extension: Automate operations from the Temporal CLI
- CLI (
tcld): Automate operations from the command line - Terraform provider: Manage Namespaces, users, and configuration as code
- Cloud Ops API: Programmatic access for custom tooling and automation
Get started
To move existing self-hosted workloads, see Migration.
Evaluate Temporal Cloud
Pricing
Plans, Action and Storage rates, commitment pricing, and worked examples for estimating a monthly bill.
Actions
Which operations count as billable Actions, by category, with the metric and Event History type for each.
Limits
Rate, resource, and configuration limits by scope, which ones you can raise, and what happens when you exceed them.
Availability
Throughput modes, the p99 latency SLO, measured latency for common operations, and the custom persistence layer behind them.
SLA
The contractual uptime guarantee for each deployment mode, and how the service-error rate is calculated.
Security model
Namespace isolation, authentication, encryption in transit and at rest, access control, and compliance certifications.
Service regions
The AWS and GCP regions where you can create a Temporal Cloud Namespace.
Support
Response times, channels, and technical guidance included with each plan, plus how to open a support ticket.