Orchestration vs Choreography
A coordinator that knows the flow, or services that react to events.
5 to work through
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A multi-step business process spans several services. When should it be orchestrated by a coordinator and when choreographed through events, and how do you tell which one you already have?
2 min answer -
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A workflow spans eight services using event choreography. Nobody can answer "where is order 41,229 stuck?". What do you change?
2 min answer -
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A workflow spans several services. What is the practical rule for choosing orchestration or choreography, and what is the design tell?
2 min answer -
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An interviewer says - we run order fulfilment across six services with events and no coordinator. Last quarter about 0.4% of orders ended in a state nobody noticed for days. Do not tell me to add tracing. What structural change do you make, and who gets paged?
3 min answer -
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An order flows through payment, restaurant acceptance, courier assignment and delivery. Should the coordination be orchestrated or choreographed?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Choreography vs Orchestration
Whether a multi-service process is driven by a central coordinator or emerges from services reacting to each other's events.
patternProcess Manager
A component that owns the state and sequencing of a multi-step business process, deciding what happens next in response to events.
conceptProcess Ownership Gap
The condition in which every step of a multi-service process has an owning team but the process itself has none, so a stall produces no error, no dea…
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Patterns
General material on architectural patterns and their trade-offs.
Layered Architecture
The default shape, its clarity, and where a technical partition fails.
Event-Driven Architecture
Publishing facts, and trading comprehensibility for decoupling.
Pipes and Filters
Independent transformation steps composed into a pipeline.
Publish/Subscribe
Broadcast to every subscriber, as distinct from work distribution.
Competing Consumers
Scaling throughput with instances, at the cost of ordering.
Saga
Local transactions with compensating actions across services.
CQRS
Separate models for writing and reading, each optimised for its job.
Event Sourcing
The event log as the system of record, with state as a projection.
Outbox
Making the event atomic with the business write it describes.
Strangler Fig
Incremental replacement behind a routing facade.
Anti-Corruption Layer
Translating a foreign model at the boundary so it does not leak in.
Sidecar & Ambassador
Cross-cutting behaviour in a co-deployed process.
Service Mesh
Sidecars applied estate-wide, and the scale at which that pays.
API Gateway
A single entry point for policy, routing and protocol translation.
Backend for Frontend
A narrow backend per client experience, owned by that client's team.
Cell-Based Architecture
Complete isolated copies each serving a subset of customers.
Sharding Patterns
Directory versus embedded keys, logical shards and rebalancing.
Materialized Views
Precomputed query results, refreshed incrementally or in full.