What is orchestration versus choreography in workflow automation architecture?

Orchestration uses a central coordinator that directs the execution sequence of workflow steps, maintaining the overall state and determining what happens next. The orchestrator has a global view of the process and explicitly calls each service in the defined order. This provides clear process visibility, easier debugging, and centralized error handling but creates a single point of failure and tighter coupling. Choreography has each service independently react to events and publish their own events, with no central coordinator. Services know their own responsibilities but not the overall process. This provides better scalability, loose coupling, and resilience but makes the overall process flow harder to visualize and debug. Most production systems use a hybrid approach where orchestration manages the high-level process flow while choreography handles communication between loosely coupled microservices within each workflow step. Tools like Temporal and Camunda support orchestration while Kafka and event mesh platforms enable choreography.