Hard Software Hard Software Episode 12: Infrastructure Evolutions with Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder + CTO @ Temporal
Jul 3, 2025
Maxim Fateev, Co-founder and CTO at Temporal, shares his journey from the Soviet Union to tech innovation at Amazon and beyond. He dives into the architectural complexities of distributed systems and the advantages of the PubSub model. The discussion highlights the crucial need for reliability in modern systems, while exploring durable execution for long-running processes. Maxim also addresses state management challenges in AI workflows and champions composable infrastructure, emphasizing Temporal's role in streamlining cloud programming and enhancing developer efficiency.
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Maxim's Journey to Temporal
- Maxim Fateev transitioned from physics in Moscow and Brazil to software engineering in the US starting in 1995.
- He gained deep experience working on telecom C++ systems and Amazon’s messaging platform before launching Temporal.
PubSub Good For Runtime, Not Devs
- PubSub systems work well at runtime but are a low-level developer abstraction that complicates building distributed systems.
- Temporal abstracts PubSub internally to provide a higher-level programming model that simplifies durable execution.
The Birth of Durable Execution
- Early workflow orchestration focused on event graphs but they became complex and hard to maintain.
- Maxim realized it’s better to write normal code with durable execution that preserves code state rather than manipulate event graphs.