Loïc Déchamps

In modern platform engineering, building a developer self-service portal isn’t just about provisioning — it’s about ensuring the entire golden path reliably completes, from infrastructure to runtime configuration. Whether you're spinning up environments for feature previews or onboarding a new client, orchestration is the logic that holds everything together — especially when things go wrong. Your orchestrator should let you observe state transitions and trigger specific commands accordingly—whether it's provisioning, reconciling drift, or handling failures.

Databases follow the principle of transactions — a set of changes that must either all succeed or all fail. But when an application interacts with multiple databases or connects to various APIs (as is the case for most applications today), the guarantees of ACID are lost. Workflows, state machines, and the saga pattern help achieve a similar level of reliability, often at the cost of more complex code. Here, we introduce a Node.js framework that makes it easy to write such workflows in TypeScript.

To follow along, you can find the full source code in Orbit’s GitHub repository.

Infra is code! At first glance, this slogan might be the most stupid one ever read for a long time — if not on the entire planet, then at least in the web sphere. Yes, infrastructure has always been code: from the Ubuntu web server to the Cockroach database, it is nothing but code controlled by code. But if the Ops field has progressively shifted towards the notion of Infrastructure as Code, it is precisely because there is a substantial difference: the DevOps domain is better formalized as a description of reproducible artifacts rather than as a prescription of successive commands to execute. Thus, boldly displaying this slogan Infra is code! on any article should make any somewhat experienced DevOps practitioner pause.