Agentic Orchestration

Orchestration is the layer of coordination above individual workflows. Where a workflow automates one task end to end, orchestration governs how many of those workflows and the agents inside them fit together: which one starts, what it depends on, how its output reaches the next, and where a human needs to weigh in. The industry usually pictures this as a central orchestrator, a manager agent or engine that calls workers and sequences every step.

There is a different model that scales better for software delivery. Rather than one engine that owns the whole lifecycle as a single state machine, orchestration can run as many small workflows that each own one concern and react to events. No master controller decides what happens next, because each workflow already knows what it is responsible for and what conditions cause it to run. This is the same shift application architecture made from monoliths to microservices, applied to the lifecycle: local ownership, parallel execution, and fault isolation, with the coordination carried by events rather than a shared pipeline. The coordination still has a home. It lives in the control plane, which holds the policies, permissions, and state that orchestration runs against.

A new bug report lands and a triage workflow classifies it, sets severity, and decides it needs a design before implementation. It does not hand the ticket to a design workflow directly. It emits an event saying the ticket is ready for design, and the design workflow picks it up on its own. Meanwhile, unrelated work keeps moving: a CI-fix workflow is repairing a failing build on another branch, and a documentation workflow is updating a changed API reference. None of these waits on the others. When the design is approved at a human gate, that approval becomes the event that lets implementation begin. The organization runs many flows at once, coordinated by events, with people supervising the points that carry risk.