Orchestration
Orchestration is the coordination of multiple agents, steps, or processes to accomplish complex goals—handling dependencies, failures, and resource allocation.
Definition
Orchestration refers to the higher-level coordination of agent activities. While a single agent operates through the agentic loop, orchestration manages:
- Multi-agent coordination: Multiple agents working together on a task
- Workflow sequencing: Ordering steps with dependencies
- Resource management: Allocating compute, API calls, or other limited resources
- Failure handling: Detecting errors, retrying, or escalating
- Result aggregation: Combining outputs from multiple agents or steps
Why It Matters
Most non-trivial agent applications require orchestration:
Specialization: Different agents excel at different tasks. Orchestration routes work appropriately.
Reliability: Orchestration layers add error handling, retries, and fallbacks.
Scalability: Coordinating parallel execution improves throughput.
Observability: Orchestration provides natural checkpoints for monitoring and debugging.
Without orchestration, agent systems become fragile, opaque, and difficult to maintain.
Orchestration Patterns
Sequential: Steps execute in order, each feeding into the next. Simple, predictable, but slow.
Parallel: Independent steps execute simultaneously. Fast, but requires careful dependency management.
Conditional: Flow branches based on intermediate results. Flexible, but increases complexity.
Supervisor: A meta-agent coordinates worker agents, assigning tasks and reviewing outputs.
Event-driven: Steps trigger based on events rather than explicit sequencing. Decoupled but harder to reason about.
Common Misconceptions
"Orchestration is just workflow automation" Traditional workflow automation is deterministic. Agent orchestration must handle the non-determinism inherent in language model outputs.
"More agents mean better results" Coordination overhead can exceed benefits. Start with minimal agents, add complexity when needed.
"Orchestration handles everything" Orchestration manages coordination, not capability. Poor underlying agents produce poor results regardless of orchestration quality.