Orchestration

Definition

Orchestration is the coordination and sequencing of multiple agents, tools, LLM calls, and data sources to execute a complex multi-step workflow reliably. An orchestrator is the component responsible for managing execution flow: it knows the overall goal, what steps are needed, which agents or tools to invoke at each step, and how to handle failures and branch conditions. Orchestration is the layer above individual agents that makes multi-step, multi-component AI systems coherent and controllable.

Engineering Context

Orchestration is the infrastructure concern that sits above individual agents. An orchestrator tracks workflow state, routes between agents, handles failures, manages parallel execution, and enforces timeouts and cost limits. LangGraph, Temporal, and custom state machines are common orchestration approaches for enterprise AI systems. A critical engineering principle: the orchestrator should be deterministic. The non-deterministic LLM calls happen inside agents; the orchestration layer uses explicit control flow. This separation of concerns makes production systems debuggable and auditable. Always implement circuit breakers, retry limits, and total cost caps at the orchestration layer.

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