[orthoxerox]

I think extensive orchestration leads to the orchestrator becoming a single point of failure. If the orchestrator starts converting events to commands then soon it starts storing state and becomes a big ball of mud.

My preferred form of orchestrator is a gatekeeper. A gatekeeper does three things only:

- maintains a table of which service consumes which events and why - copies events from the outgoing queues to the dedicated incoming queues according to the routing table (or controls access to the incoming queues via RBAC) - logs the metadata about the messages it has seen

It doesn't inspect the messages in any way, store them or maintain any runtime state at all.