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Layer 7 of 20

State & Flow Management

State machines and workflow control: orchestration patterns, sagas, idempotency, and deterministic state transitions.

Responsibilities

  • Provide orchestration patterns (sagas, state machines) for multi-step workflows.
  • Guarantee idempotency and deterministic transitions.
  • Make retries, timeouts, and compensation first-class.

Key interfaces

  • Workflow definitions (states, transitions, invariants).
  • Idempotency keys and deduplication.
  • Compensation/rollback handlers for partial failures.

Operational signals

These are the measurements that tell you whether this layer is healthy in production.

  • Workflow success rate and time-to-completion (p50/p95).
  • Retry and compensation frequency.
  • Dead-letter queue / stuck workflow backlog.

Failure modes

  • Duplicate effects due to missing idempotency.
  • Stuck workflows due to missing timeouts.
  • Compensation logic that is unsafe or incomplete.

Production readiness checklist

  • Require idempotency keys for all externally-triggered workflow steps.
  • Add timeouts, dead-lettering, and operator tooling for stuck states.
  • Test compensation paths (including partial success) regularly.
State & Flow Management — HOWFAR Architecture — HOWFAR