4 posts tagged with "workflow"

In our previous blog post, we introduced the basics of orchestration and showed how to write a deployment workflow for a backend service. Now, let’s take it further. Imagine our web agencies manage web services across multiple tenants : one cloud instance per client. The stack includes several services, such as frontend, authentication, and backend. And it must support multi-tenant deployment. This brings new challenges:

• coordinating deployments across environments
• sharing common resources (like a cloud account, a VPC, a database...) between services in the stack
• handling failures and rollbacks
• keeping each tenant isolated yet manageable To address this, we need to go beyond simple workflows and start managing state, transitions, shared resources, and deployment strategies. Let’s see how simple this becomes with Orbits.

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.

While cloud services offer great flexibility in their usage and consumption, their growth has also led to an increase in the supply, with a multiplication of APIs, tools, and platforms to enhance, facilitate, and optimize access to cloud services. [1] This proliferation of offerings is one of the reasons that has led to the heterogeneity of cloud environments and the difficulty of their interoperability. [2]. It is now widely accepted that “cloud resource management, traditionally handled by system administrators, must now be automated to be efficient, secure, and dynamic.” [3]

From this perspective, Ops teams and developers must be supported by complex engineering platforms called Internal Developer Platforms. These platforms must ensure requirements for quality of service, security, and cloud cost, while also allowing administrators access for audit, customization, and modification purposes.

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.