Software Engineering Daily

Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya

33 snips
Oct 2, 2025
Viren Baraiya, Founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, shares insights on modern workflow orchestration. He discusses the challenges of coordinating microservices and the evolution of Orkes, which builds on the open-source Conductor project. Viren explains the difference between rule-based and programmatic workflows, highlights Orkes' integrations with AI agents, and outlines the importance of trust and governance in orchestration. His journey from Netflix to Orkes reveals the future of agentic systems and their potential.
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ANECDOTE

Career Path That Spawned Conductor

  • Viren described his path from Goldman Sachs to Netflix to Google and then founding Orkes four years ago.
  • He credits Netflix as the origin of Conductor while at the Netflix infrastructure team building a large production studio platform.
INSIGHT

Orchestration Solves Microservice Chaos

  • Conductor was born to coordinate many microservices and tame complexity without sacrificing the benefits of loose coupling.
  • Netflix needed an orchestrator to make failures diagnosable and to manage state across services at scale.
INSIGHT

Workflows Are Stateful State Machines

  • Workflows are basically state machines that simplify maintaining consistent state across distributed systems.
  • Offloading state-management to a workflow engine makes building resilient, scalable systems easier.
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