Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya

Modern software systems are composed of many independent microservices spanning frontends, backends, APIs, and AI models, and coordinating and scaling them reliably is a constant challenge. A workflow orchestration platform addresses this by providing a structured framework to define, execute, and monitor complex workflows with resilience and clarity. Orkes is an enterprise-scale agentic orchestration platform that builds on the open-source Conductor project, which was pioneered at Netflix. The platform coordinates AI agents, humans and APIs, with a focus on scalability, compliance, and trust. It further expands on the Conductor core by adding features like security, governance, and long-running workflows. Viren Baraiya is the Founder and CTO at Orkes, and he's the creator of Netflix Conductor. Viren joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his building Conductor at Netflix, the challenge of orchestrating microservices, rule-based versus programmatic workflow orchestration, agentic orchestration, MCP integration, and much more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Orkes. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com