What is Orchestration? Understanding Data, Software & Infrastructure Orchestration

Orchestration involves coordinating interconnected steps and dependencies into a single, automated workflow across different domains like data pipelines, software lifecycles, and infrastructure automation. It is interpreted differently by various roles: DevOps engineers might use it for deploying containers or automating deployments, data engineers for managing ETL pipelines, and infrastructure teams for provisioning resources. Despite these differences, effective orchestration handles triggers, manages dependencies, maintains state, and enhances visibility, providing a unified management approach that breaks down silos. Data orchestration focuses on managing state and ensuring data reliability, software orchestration automates application lifecycles and emphasizes agility and fault tolerance in microservices, while infrastructure orchestration ensures resource optimization and governance. Kestra is highlighted as a platform that unifies these aspects, offering a YAML-driven and low-code interface to design and monitor workflows, providing extensive integrations and governance features to enhance agility, visibility, and cost efficiency.