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docs: Serverless Workers - Encyclopedia (4/4)#4415

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lennessyy wants to merge 3 commits intofeat/serverless-worker-prereleasefrom
feat/serverless-worker-4-encyclopedia
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docs: Serverless Workers - Encyclopedia (4/4)#4415
lennessyy wants to merge 3 commits intofeat/serverless-worker-prereleasefrom
feat/serverless-worker-4-encyclopedia

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@lennessyy lennessyy commented Apr 8, 2026

Summary

  • Add the encyclopedia page for Serverless Workers (docs/encyclopedia/workers/serverless-workers.mdx) with conceptual overview and architecture diagram
  • Update workers.mdx and task-queues.mdx with references to Serverless Workers
  • Add serverless-worker-flow.svg diagram to static assets
  • Update sidebar to include the new encyclopedia entry under Workers
  • Add "Serverless Worker" to Vale terms list
  • Change onBrokenLinks/onBrokenAnchors from 'throw' to 'warn' to accommodate cross-references to pages in other PRs

Part 4 of 4 in the series splitting #4405 into smaller PRs.

Test plan

  • Verify the encyclopedia page renders correctly
  • Verify the SVG diagram displays properly
  • Verify sidebar shows the new entry under Workers
  • Verify links to other serverless worker pages show as warnings (not errors) until all PRs are merged

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

┆Attachments: EDU-6187 docs: Serverless Workers - Encyclopedia (4/4)

Add the encyclopedia entry for Serverless Workers, update workers.mdx
and task-queues.mdx with serverless references, add the architecture
diagram, update sidebar, and add "Serverless Worker" to Vale terms.

Change onBrokenLinks/onBrokenAnchors to 'warn' to accommodate
cross-references to pages in other PRs in this series.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@lennessyy lennessyy requested a review from a team as a code owner April 8, 2026 23:50
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github-actions bot commented Apr 8, 2026

📖 Docs PR preview links

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ A Worker Program is the static code that defines the constraints of the Worker P
- [How to run a development Worker using the TypeScript SDK](/develop/typescript/workers/run-worker-process#run-a-dev-worker)
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@lennessyy lennessyy Apr 8, 2026

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The worker page is going to need a rewrite. With serverless workers, I think we need to update how users should think of this abstraction that we never quite defined well in the docs. Would love some product/engineering input on this question.

  • What is a worker?

We don't answer this question at all right now, and deflect to lower-level abstractions, which isn't very helpful and does not account for serverless workers:

In day-to-day conversations, the term Worker is used to denote either a Worker Program, a Worker Process, or a Worker Entity. Temporal documentation aims to be explicit and differentiate between them.

Maybe something like:

A Worker is the execution environment for your Workflows and Activities. It's where your application code actually runs within Temporal's architecture.

There is no always-on infrastructure to provision or scale.
Temporal invokes the Worker when Tasks arrive on a Task Queue, and the Worker shuts down when the work is done.

A Serverless Worker uses the same Temporal SDKs as a traditional Worker.
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@lennessyy lennessyy Apr 9, 2026

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I have been using "traditional worker" to refer to long-lived workers when comparing them against serverless. Do we have a preferred name for our normal workers? Standard worker? Long-lived worker? Hosted worker (not great sounds like we host them)? Always-on worker? Or are we happy with traditional

The comparison table lives on the evaluate page now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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