Glossary · OrchestrationAlso called workflow engine, pipelineChecked 27 September 2026
What is orchestration, and what happens when a step in it fails?
Orchestration is the part of a system that decides what runs, in what order, and what happens when a step fails. It owns retries, timeouts, ordering, and the record of what already ran. Every system has one, whether it was designed or whether it emerged as a cron job calling a script that calls three more.
In one lineWhat runs, in what order, and what happens when a step fails.
Why it matters to you
The question worth asking about orchestration is where the state lives. If a run half completes, what does the system know? A system that records each step as it finishes can resume. One that does not has to start again, which is how a retry turns into a duplicate.
The craft retailer's outreach system splits this deliberately into two planes that never talk directly and share only a database. A reasoning session on one machine finds, scores, drafts and schedules. A deterministic service on a small server polls for jobs whose time has come, marks each job as it goes, and posts a confirmation per send. The intelligence and the irreversible action are in different processes on purpose.
That split is also what makes the failure behaviour describable. When the sending half has no judgement in it, there is nothing to debug about why it decided to send.
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