system-type-workflow-orchestration Skill

Source

• Creator: microsoft
• Repository: microsoft/amplifier-bundle-systems-design
• Skill file: skills/system-type-workflow-orchestration/SKILL.md

What it does

Domain patterns for workflow orchestration systems — long-running processes, state machines, saga coordination, human-in-the-loop gates, retry and timeout hierarchies, and failure modes. Use when designing or evaluating workflow engines, job orchestrators, or multi-step business process systems.

Skill instructions

System Type: Workflow Orchestration Patterns, failure modes, and anti-patterns for long-running workflow and process orchestration systems. --- Core Patterns Orchestration vs Choreography Orchestration. A central coordinator owns the workflow definition and explicitly directs each step. The coordinator calls services, waits for results, handles failures, and decides what happens next. The entire flow is visible in one place. When to use. Complex multi-step processes (5+ steps). Flows with conditional branching, retries, timeouts, or compensation logic. When you need a single place to understand what the process does. When you need to answer "where is this order in the pipeline?" without querying every service. When to avoid. Simple event reactions (service A publishes, service B reacts). When the coordinator becomes a bottleneck or single point of failure you can't tolerate. When teams owning individual steps need to evolve independently without touching the orchestrator. Choreography.