Durable execution
Running a long process so its progress is saved after every step, letting it survive crashes and pause for hours or days, then resume.
An agent that waits for a manager’s approval, or a process that calls slow external systems, cannot live in one server request. A durable execution engine (Temporal, Restate, Inngest, Cloudflare Workflows, LangGraph checkpoints) records each completed step; after a restart it replays the record and continues where it stopped. Steps must be deterministic or idempotent, because they can run again.
Related terms
- Human in the loop: A person approves, edits or rejects the agent’s action before it takes effect.
- Saga pattern: A business process across several services run as a chain of local transactions, with a compensating action to undo each step if a later one fails.
- Agentic loop: The cycle of model call, tool call and result that an agent repeats until it stops.
- Idempotency (idempotency key): An operation is idempotent if doing it twice has the same effect as doing it once. Retries become safe.
- Agent graph (state graph): Modeling an agent as explicit nodes, edges and shared state, with checkpoints, so each step can be paused, resumed, inspected and tested.
