Orchestration

A practical example

Example: a product launch workflow orchestrates five steps — enrich new contacts, wait for the sync job to finish, branch by segment, send the announcement, and notify sales only if the send succeeded — with defined behavior at each failure point.

What to evaluate before investing

• Ask how the platform expresses dependencies between steps and whether it waits for completion or just fires sequentially.
• Review what happens when a mid-workflow step fails: rollback, skip, pause, or alert, and who decides.
• Check whether long-running workflows (days or weeks) survive restarts and maintain their state.

Limitations and tradeoffs

Vendors use 'orchestration' for everything from simple sequences to full workflow engines; evaluate the dependency and failure-handling features concretely rather than trusting the label.