The era of durable execution (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Stephan Ewen, Founder and CEO of Restate.dev joins the show to talk about the coming era of resilient apps, the meaning of and what it takes to achieve idempotency, this world of stateful durable execution functions, and when it makes sense to reach for this tech.

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Sponsors:

• Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
• Heroku – The Next Generation of Heroku “Fir” is coming soon — Fir is built on a foundation of cloud native technologies and open source standards, ensuring portability, interoperability, and a vibrant ecosystem for your applications. Cloud Native for everyone, for the next decade and beyond.
• Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.

Featuring:

• Stephan Ewen – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• restate.dev
• temporal.io
• resonatehq/resonate

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Kapitler

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Retool (00:00:56)

https://retool.com/changelog

3. Start the show! (00:03:46)

4. Demystify Idempotency (00:06:56)

5. Achieving Idempotency (00:09:09)

6. Where does the word Idempotency come from? (00:11:38)

7. Why solve this problem? Why you? (00:13:53)

8. Leaving Flink (00:22:51)

9. Sponsor: Heroku (00:29:15)

https://www.heroku.com/changelogpodcast

10. What is durability? (00:31:56)

11. When should I reach for this? (00:39:22)

12. The era of Resilent Apps as a service (RAaaS)? (00:46:03)

13. Marketing challenge of resilience (00:49:32)

14. Tangent: Why are AI agent demos booking flights? (00:53:50)

15. Sponsor: Augment Code (00:55:27)

https://www.augmentcode.com

16. Adam predicts that "this is the year" of durable and resilience (00:58:57)

17. Infra required for Restate (01:10:46)

18. It's Schrödinger's cat (01:15:16)

19. Publishing Changelog with Restate? (01:19:22)

20. This new world of durable execution functions (01:30:41)

21. Changelog.com/community (01:36:13)

https://changelog.com/community

22. Closing thoughts? (01:36:34)

23. More thoughts and closing (01:38:24)