For the GP poster - I agree with Maxim here. We've been evaluating workflow orchestration and durable function systems for a while and finally whittled down to where we think we're going to pull the trigger on either Azure Durable Functions or Temporal. Temporal is really nice - the fact that you are "just writing code" is such a huge bonus over some other stuff like AWS Step Functions, Cadence, and Conductor.
As an aside, the engineering/sales engineering team over there seems top notch.
What I meant specifically is that the current state of a workflow is stored in a format that’s opaque to any component other than the workflow itself.
E.g. if I have a “shopping cart checkout” workflow and the user is not making progress, how can I can I tell which step of the workflow the user is stuck at?
Every step of the workflow is durably recorded. So you have the full information about the exact state of each workflow. To troubleshoot, you can even download the event history and replay workflow in a debugger as many times as needed.
The ease of troubleshooting is one of the frequently cited benefits of the approach.
The function's event data and current state is all stored in table storage, so you could query that - I'd expect you'd need to query an event-store-based solution in a similar way?
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of the project.