2.5. Orchestrate Processes

💡 First Principle: Process orchestration connects data sources, transformations, and destinations into automated workflows—like a conductor coordinating different sections of an orchestra. Without orchestration, you'd manually run each step and hope they complete in the right order. The conductor ensures the violins don't start before the trumpets finish.

What breaks without proper orchestration? Consider needing to: (1) Extract customer data from Salesforce, (2) Transform it by merging with product data, (3) Load into a lakehouse, (4) Run a quality check notebook, (5) Trigger a Power BI refresh. Without orchestration, someone runs each step manually, checks for errors, and triggers the next step. They go home for the night, step 3 fails, and nobody knows until morning.