All terms
Glossary
Workflow orchestration
A service that drives multi-step workflows, holds state, handles retries and continues in a defined way after failures.
Once a workflow spans several systems, waiting periods or approvals, a script no longer suffices. You need a place that knows where every single transaction stands.
Tools range from AWS Step Functions through Temporal to classic process engines.
How you notice it
- Several steps depend on each other.
- After a failure it is unclear what already ran.
- Processes are held together by cron jobs and sleep statements.
Frequently asked
How is this different from a few cron jobs?
Visible state. An orchestrator knows which step ran, which failed and where a restart can pick up. Cron jobs know nothing about each other, and that is exactly what breaks troubleshooting at four in the morning.