What is a Failure?

Temporal Failures are representations (in the SDKs and Event History) of various types of errors that occur in the system.

• KB article: Temporal Failures

Failure handling is an essential part of development. For more information, including the difference between application-level and platform-level failures, see Handling Failure From First Principles. For the practical application of those concepts in Temporal, see Failure Handling in Practice.

For languages that throw (or raise) errors (or exceptions), throwing an error that is not a Temporal Failure from a Workflow fails the Workflow Task (and the Task will be retried until it succeeds), whereas throwing a Temporal Failure (or letting a Temporal Failure propagate from Temporal calls, like an Activity Failure from an Activity call) fails the Workflow Execution. For more information, see Application Failure.