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What Orchestration is
Orchestration routes work, decomposes goals, sequences tasks, and manages retries and approvals. It decides what happens next, in what order, on what trigger, and with what retry and escalation behaviour, without performing domain reasoning or holding long-lived memory of its own.
Synedrix OS treats orchestration as the center of gravity of the whole platform: the durable value of the system is the quality of its sequencing, governance, and observability, not any single model or agent. Since ADR-OS-001, this layer is deliberately narrow: it sequences and gates, while stateful or cyclic agent reasoning is delegated to Agent Runtime as a governed step.
What it owns, and what it does not
Every layer in the architecture has a non-overlapping responsibility. The boundary is as much a part of the design as the capability.
Owns
- The workflow router: deciding which workflow or sub-workflow handles a trigger
- The execution planner and task graph
- Retry logic, timeout management, and error/compensation handling
- Escalation rules and approval routing
- Sub-workflow calls and composition
- Outcome persistence and event emission at the end of every run
Does not own
- Domain-specific heuristics and business logic
- → Domain Pack Layer
- Long-lived memory management
- → Memory & Data Layer
- Stateful, cyclic, multi-agent reasoning
- → Agent Runtime Layer (LangGraph)
- Policy decisions
- → Policy Guard Agent (os-agt-002)
- Canonical business state
- → Supabase PG17 (Layer 7)
- LLM traces, prompts, evaluations
- → Langfuse (Layer 10)
Interfaces with
The other layers this one exchanges work, state, or decisions with, and why.
Agent runtime
orchestration invokes LangGraph as a governed step whenever a workflow's execution pattern is stateful or cyclic.
Governance
every approval-gated or high-impact workflow routes through Policy Guard and the HITL Gateway first.
Observability
every workflow run emits correlation-carrying events and outcomes, satisfying the invariant that every workflow must be observable end-to-end.
Event bus
triggers arrive as events and outcomes are emitted as events; orchestration is a first-class producer and consumer, not a black box between them.
How Synedrix OS implements it
n8n is the concrete implementation of this layer. Every compliant workflow follows a required structural skeleton, in this order: trigger, input validation, correlation-ID initialization, execution-pattern-specific node topology, outcome assembly and persistence, outcome-event emission.
The Workflow Contract Spec is what every workflow at this layer must satisfy: a fixed set of fields including workflow_id, trigger_type, execution_pattern, approval_requirements, retry_policy, error_policy, and observability_signals, plus nine canonical execution-pattern values from sequential and parallel through iterative, consensus, and reflect-and-revise.
ADR-OS-001 defines the boundary with Agent Runtime: n8n keeps event triggers, validation, sequencing, policy/HITL routing, and deterministic glue; anything requiring shared, evolving state across cycles or agents is routed to LangGraph instead, invoked as a governed step that must return the canonical Outcome Envelope.
Platform mapping
n8n
Workflow engine; all workflow definitions live here. Orchestration only: complex agent reasoning runs in LangGraph.
OS agents at this layer
Orchestrator Agent
control · os-agt-001Decomposes goals into task graphs, routes to specialists, manages retries and approvals.
Layer principles that apply
- Shared before specific: routing, retries, and escalation are reusable across every domain pack, which is precisely why they live in the OS layer.
- Controls before execution: execution paths pass through Policy Guard and the HITL Gateway rather than bypassing them for convenience.
Orchestration questions, answered
Short, citable answers drawn from this page.
What is the Orchestration layer in Synedrix OS?
Orchestration is layer 3 of the twelve-layer Synedrix OS architecture, in the "Orchestration core" group. The center of gravity. It sequences and retries; it does not reason.
What does the Orchestration layer own?
The Orchestration layer owns: The workflow router: deciding which workflow or sub-workflow handles a trigger; The execution planner and task graph; Retry logic, timeout management, and error/compensation handling; Escalation rules and approval routing; Sub-workflow calls and composition; Outcome persistence and event emission at the end of every run.
What does the Orchestration layer not own?
The Orchestration layer does not own: Domain-specific heuristics and business logic (owned by Domain Pack Layer); Long-lived memory management (owned by Memory & Data Layer); Stateful, cyclic, multi-agent reasoning (owned by Agent Runtime Layer (LangGraph)); Policy decisions (owned by Policy Guard Agent (os-agt-002)); Canonical business state (owned by Supabase PG17 (Layer 7)); LLM traces, prompts, evaluations (owned by Langfuse (Layer 10)).
The full reference page, with every canonical specification this layer touches, lives in the documentation repository, which is private while the platform is being built.