Coordinating multi-step business processes (with retries, branching, time-based steps) so they run reliably end-to-end.
Workflow orchestration is the discipline of coordinating multi-step processes that span time, services, and conditions: 'when an order is placed, charge the card, reserve inventory, send a confirmation, schedule fulfillment, retry each step on failure'. Tools like Temporal, Argo Workflows, AWS Step Functions, Airflow, and Prefect provide durable execution: the workflow's state is persisted so a worker crash mid-step doesn't lose progress, and retries, timeouts, and branching are first-class primitives.
Workflows hand-rolled with cron jobs and database state are quietly broken in ways that surface only at scale: race conditions between steps, lost retries, untraceable failures, no audit trail. A real orchestrator collapses all that into 'workflow X is in step Y, here's the history' and gives you back the engineering time you would have spent on workflow plumbing.
See the part of the platform that handles workflow orchestration in production.