Orchestration
Coordinate workflows, agents, robots, APIs, and people across time and failure.
- 12 minutes
- advanced
- Reviewed 2026-07-16
What is it?
Orchestration coordinates participants and state in a process that may pause, retry, wait for events, or continue for days.
Why does it matter?
Scheduling starts work; orchestration also knows what stage the case is in, what failed, who owns the next step, and how to resume safely.
The mental model
Orchestration is the conductor that holds state, directs handoffs, and keeps the whole process observable.
A simple example
A claim moves through document extraction, AI classification, fraud review, human approval, payment automation, and customer notification.
What it is not
It is not merely a timer, a long prompt, or a canvas full of disconnected tasks.
Learn this first
These ideas make the lesson easier to place.
- Workflows
- Agent loop
- Human in the loop
Your first 60 minutes
Use one focused hour to make the idea concrete.
- Draw one end-to-end process with systems and people.
- Mark state, waits, retries, and ownership.
- Define one recovery path for each external dependency.
Build this first
Model a long-running onboarding process that can pause for documents, resume after approval, and retry one failed integration safely.
When not to use it
Avoid a heavyweight orchestrator for a short stateless integration that one reliable workflow can own.
What to learn next
Learn observability, versioning, and cost control.