The Orchestrator: State Transitions and Kafka Routing

In the previous post, I explained why I chose the Saga Pattern over distributed transactions. Now let's look at the central piece: the orchestrator. The orchestrator is the brain of the system. It receives events from all services and decides what happens next. It doesn't hold any business logic. It doesn't talk to databases. It just routes messages based on a state transition table. The State Transition Table The entire saga flow is defined in a single static array. Each row maps a (source, sta