Traditional cloud applications tend to mix up several core concerns, such as business logic, state management, and handling of failures, into a ‘Smoothie’ architecture, which greatly impedes their development and evolution. Ideally, we want these concerns to be organized into a ‘Layer Cake’ architecture, for better separation of them and for easier development. In this talk Sergey will show how Durable Execution of Temporal enables such a transition and makes building scalable distributed applications qualitatively easier.