Coinbase Completes Complex Migration of Over 300 Temporal Namespaces

Coinbase recently completed the migration of over 300 Temporal namespaces from their self-hosted cluster to Temporal Cloud. This complex operation involved more than 300 services and was a crucial step in improving scalability, performance, and security for the company's trading workflows, payments, and regulatory flows.

The original setup consisted of a single shared cluster backed by a custom-built persistence layer. However, this arrangement led to several issues, including scaling and performance problems, operational load, blast radius, and security concerns.

To address these challenges, Coinbase divided the migration into two phases. Phase 1 involved moving namespaces from the custom monolith to open-source Temporal backed by Amazon Aurora clusters still operated by the company. This staging ground allowed the team to test their runbooks, routing controls, and rollback procedures on production traffic before switching to Temporal Cloud.

During the migration process, Coinbase prioritized low friction for product teams and ensured that there was no planned downtime on critical trading and payment paths. The company also implemented a rollback path at every stage and maintained clear visibility into the progress of each namespace.