Orchestrator
A component that coordinates the order state retries and outcomes of work performed by other components.
Plain English
The coordinator that tells several parts when and how to run.
In context
An orchestrator centralizes workflow control across services jobs or agents and must handle partial failure idempotency and visibility.
Example
“The deployment orchestrator pauses the rollout when health checks fail.”
When you'll hear this
- distributed systems
- automation
- deployment pipelines
Common misunderstanding
An orchestrator coordinates work but does not necessarily execute every underlying task itself.
Also known as
orchestration engineworkflow orchestrator
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-26
