Workflow orchestration should not require adopting a whole platform
I’ve been thinking a lot about workflow orchestration in distributed systems.
A common pattern I keep seeing:
A team starts with simple HTTP calls between services.
Then they need:
- retries
- compensation
- callbacks
- timeouts
- observability
- partial failure handling
- long-running operations
Eventually, someone says: "we need a workflow platform."
Sometimes that is true.
But sometimes the platform becomes bigger than the problem.
My argument is that many teams don’t need a full workflow platform at first. They need a durable orchestration layer that speaks the same language their systems already speak: HTTP.
That is the direction I’ve been exploring with Trama: orchestration as an API, not as a new programming model everyone has to adopt.
The goal is not to replace every workflow engine.
The goal is to cover the large middle ground between:
- "just call another service"
- and "adopt Temporal/Cadence/Airflow/etc."
Curious how people here think about this tradeoff.
When does orchestration justify a full platform, and when is that overkill?