Temporal is an open-source orchestration platform designed for building and running reliable distributed applications at scale. It handles the complexity of managing long-running workflows and microservices by providing built-in features like automatic retries, state management, and failure recovery, allowing developers to write business logic as simple code without worrying about infrastructure concerns. The platform ensures that workflows complete successfully even in the face of failures, network issues, or service outages, making it particularly valuable for mission-critical applications that require durability and consistency across distributed systems.