Long-term commitment and support for the Cadence project, and its community

Dear valued Cadence users and developers,

Some of you might have read Temporal’s recent announcement about their decision to drop the support for the Cadence project. This message caused some confusion in the community, so we would like to take this opportunity to clear things out.

First of all, Uber is committed to the long-term success of the Cadence project. Since its inception 5 years ago, use cases built on Cadence and their scale have grown significantly at Uber. Today, Cadence powers a variety of our most business-critical use cases (some public stories are available here (opens new window) and here (opens new window)). At the same time, the Cadence development team at Uber has enjoyed rapid growth with the product and has been driving innovations of workflow technology across the board, from new features (e.g. graceful failover (opens new window), workflow shadowing (opens new window), UI improvements (opens new window)) to better engineering foundations (e.g. gRPC support (opens new window), multi-tenancy support (opens new window)), all in a backwards compatible manner. Neither Uber’s use nor support of Cadence is going to change with Temporal’s announcement. We have a long list of features and exciting roadmaps ahead of us, and we will share more details in our next meetup in November ‘21. As always we will continue to push the boundaries of scale and reliability as our usage within Uber grows.

Secondly, we are committed to maintaining and growing a healthy and collaborative community. Cadence continues to attract attention as a popular open source platform (opens new window), with more than 100 contributors to our project, and more than 1500 developers in our open source Slack support channel (opens new window). The Uber Cadence team, along with our open source partners like Long (opens new window) from Indeed, have been behind the management and support of the Cadence open source community for the past 2 years. Moving forward, we are going to work even more closely with our community, through a series of online and offline channels including meetups, office hours, tech deep dives, and design consultations. We would also like to scale the way we operate, by creating a Cadence OSS Committee that allows us to maintain a closer relationship with its members, so that we can learn from each other's Cadence experiences and grow together. Please definitely let us know your suggestions on the type of engagements that you would like to see with the core team.

About Temporal and its “EOL announcement”

Temporal is a startup that was started 2 years ago based on a Cadence fork by some of the original Cadence team members. We are always grateful for their original contribution to the Cadence project and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavours. That said the announcement from Temporal only means that their team will focus on Temporal (which has always been the case for the last 2 years), and not an official stance on Cadence since they have not been involved with the project for quite some time now.

Feel free to reach out to us (cadence-oss@googlegroups.com or slack (opens new window)) if you have any questions. And we look forward to your contribution and collaboration.

The Uber Cadence team