Workflow Orchestration
Workflow Orchestration
Our application has become highly distributed. A customer places an order. The payment service charges the card. The inventory service reserves the product. The shipping service creates a shipment. The email service sends a confirmation. Each step depends on the previous one. But what if the payment fails? Should shipping still continue? What if inventory is unavailable? Should the customer still receive a confirmation email? The engineering problem became clear. How do multiple services work together in the correct sequence while handling failures gracefully? The engineering concept that solved this problem is Workflow Orchestration. Instead of every service deciding what to do next, a workflow engine coordinates the entire process. It knows the sequence. It waits for each step to finish. If a step fails, it can retry, take an alternative path or stop the workflow altogether. The business process becomes reliable, visible and easy to manage. Amazon Web Services provides this through AWS Step Functions. Microsoft Azure provides Azure Logic Apps and Azure Durable Functions. Google Cloud provides Workflows. Different names. One engineering concept. Complex business processes became coordinated instead of chaotic. But another question soon emerged. Applications now needed passwords, API keys and database credentials. Where should we store these secrets without exposing them in our code?