What is the difference between coordination and orchestration in workflow automation?

Coordination and orchestration are both ways to manage multiple tasks, but they differ in complexity and control. Coordination is a lightweight approach where tasks are arranged in a simple sequence or parallel execution with minimal state management. It often relies on external triggers or manual steps and provides basic logging. Orchestration, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated, automated process that manages task state, retries, error handling, and monitoring. An orchestrator keeps track of the entire workflow, can pause, resume, or roll back tasks, and provides detailed logs and metrics. In practice, coordination might be used for a quick pipeline that runs a few scripts, while orchestration is used for complex data pipelines, microservice workflows, or CI/CD pipelines where reliability and observability are critical.