Some thoughts on Orchestration and Choreography
How orchestration and choreography shape microservice coordination, and why the right pattern depends on business process integrity.
Category
Microservices & APIs
Microservices, APIs, orchestration, choreography, business processes, and distributed system boundaries.
Microservices and APIs are useful patterns, but they are not universal answers.
These posts look at service boundaries, orchestration, choreography, business processes, data ownership, and the trade-offs that appear when distributed systems meet real organisations.
Microservices and Business Processes
How end-to-end business processes expose coordination challenges across microservices and enterprise systems.
Microservices and GDPR
How GDPR changes the persistence choices behind microservices, especially when customer data needs shared governance and control.
Microservices and Devops ? What would Adam Smith think …
A sceptical look at when microservices and DevOps help, and when business complexity still calls for design-led architecture.
The Microservice Debt Collectors Have Arrived
AI agents expose the integrity, rollback, query and context-window costs of over-applied microservices in systems that never needed that complexity.
Agents Don't Replace APIs. They Expose How Weak Most APIs Already Are
Agents and MCP do not replace APIs. They expose whether the execution layer underneath them is explicit, stable and safe enough to compose dynamically.
We've Seen This Before: What SOA Teaches Us About APIs in the Age of Agents
SOA's real lesson for agent-era APIs is that structural contracts are not enough. Interfaces need meaning, behaviour, authority and governance built into the contract.
APIs Expose Data, Not Meaning
Schemas describe shape, but agents need meaning. API contracts need domain intent, authority, provenance and behaviour, not just valid payloads.
Not Everything Should Be an API
APIs are right for business interaction, but audit, analytics, synchronisation, active-active operation and recovery need patterns chosen by purpose.