Architecture

Choreography vs orchestration

In a saga: services react to each other's events vs a central coordinator drives steps.

In plain terms

Choreography is decentralised, harder to debug. Orchestration centralises the workflow; easier to reason about, single point of failure.

Origin

The distinction goes back to BPMN choreography diagrams (2004). Saga pattern literature (2017+) made it standard microservices vocabulary.

Where it shows up in production

Stripe webhooks (choreography) Subscribers react to event types. No central workflow.
Temporal / Step Functions (orchestration) A workflow definition explicitly sequences each step.

Sources & further reading

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