I got several interesting replies to my automation and orchestration blog post. Some of them were so far in the land of alternate definitions that they were literally off the charts. Here’s one of the best I got in that category:

Orchestration is a group of agents that promise to behave in a certain way. These agents are not necessarily centrally managed entities.

We assume there exists a group of agents with distributed information and autonomous ability to decide/think. Their initial state of system has unknown intentions.

Therefore, things are set up as agreements. Their behavior is a cooperative operation that could be seen as a single organism. Agents can be anything, humans, or can be programmable entities, that need to be programmed to keep promises. Orchestration is a voluntary cooperation of agents.

Even a computer follows instructions because it was constructed to do so. Like in the nature those functions are not centrally orchestrated, they act like organisms that interact with each other in the form or promises.

Agents cooperate by making all the promises necessary to collectively succeed. We are dealing here with the way how nature, as a framework deals with uncertainty. Software in IT is here for example a proxy for human intent and keeps promises on our behalf.

Next time you’re buying an orchestration system check out how well it adheres to this definition and let me know, will you?