Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya

What It Covers

Viren Baraiya explains how Orkes builds on Netflix Conductor to orchestrate microservices, APIs, and AI agents at enterprise scale, focusing on programmatic workflows, long-running processes, guardrails, and trust mechanisms for agentic systems.

Key Questions Answered

• •Programmatic orchestration advantage: Conductor uses code-like workflow definitions instead of rule-based systems, allowing developers to write workflows exactly as they think about code with loops, parallel execution, and decision cases, eliminating translation friction between business rules and implementation.
• •Synchronous microservices orchestration: Orkes extends traditional asynchronous workflow engines to support both extremely long-running workflows lasting months or years and ultra-low-latency synchronous orchestration completing entire flows in tens of milliseconds for true real-time service coordination.
• •Agentic guardrails implementation: Developers explicitly define which tool executions require human approval rather than letting LLMs decide when to apply guardrails, preventing autonomous agents from executing destructive operations like cluster deletion without verification while allowing safe read operations to proceed.
• •Multi-agent tool composition: Instead of building deterministic workflows for every use case, developers create stateless tools that LLMs combine dynamically, shifting from linear development of specific paths to combinatorial possibilities where agents select appropriate tool sequences based on context.