Between Process Intent and Orchestration Reality: Closing the Delta
You've got a clear process in your head. Step one, then step two, maybe a conditional branch. On paper, it's elegant. But the moment you feed that intent into a workflow engine—Temporal, Prefect, Step Functions—something shifts. The orchestration you get back isn't exactly what you designed. Little gaps appear: a timeout you didn't anticipate, a retry policy that escalates a transient error into a full-blown incident. This article is about that delta—and how to shrink it. We're not selling a silver bullet. Orchestration is hard because reality is messy. APIs drift, workers crash, data arrives late or not at all. The gap between process intent and orchestration reality is where most workflow projects fail. But with deliberate design, local testing, and a few hard-won patterns, you can make that delta small enough to trust.