Coordinating the lifecycle of many components (containers, jobs, workflows) so the system runs as one, the job orchestrators do.
Orchestration is the discipline of coordinating multiple components, typically containers, jobs, or workflow steps, so they run, scale, recover, and update as a coherent system. Container orchestrators (Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS) place containers on hosts, schedule replicas, and handle failover. Workflow orchestrators (Airflow, Argo Workflows, Temporal, Step Functions) coordinate multi-step business processes with retries, branching, and dependencies. The two are different layers of the same pattern.
Manual coordination doesn't scale, the team that hand-deploys, hand-restarts, and hand-runs jobs spends most of its time on glue work. Orchestration converts that glue into declarative configuration the platform enforces. The result is faster recovery, smaller on-call burden, and consistent behavior across environments.
See the part of the platform that handles orchestration in production.