The Evolution of Application Architecture and the Rise of Lightweight Orchestration

From the three-tier architecture of the 90s to today's microservice-driven world, application architecture has undergone a dramatic transformation. To coordinate operations in distributed backends, the orchestration tier emerged. However, existing DIY solutions are complex and hard to maintain, while dedicated orchestration systems introduce their own complexities. This article presents a new approach: integrating orchestration functionality into a lightweight library and using a database to persist execution state. This eliminates the separate orchestration tier, simplifying development, testing, and debugging, ultimately leading to more reliable and efficient application architectures.