Orchestration Vs. Choreography

Orchestration generally refers to a sequence of steps that live within a single contained process, where one orchestrator can see and control the entire process. Typically, an individual BPEL process fits into this category.

Choreography is a broader process where pieces of the process are part of a choreography chain of events, but none of the individual pieces understand about each other. They know what triggers them, and what they trigger to happen, but nothing sits at a higher level co-coordinating them. They just know the part they have to play. This is more typical of how a number of different long running processes interact with one another, and especially if a broader process is broken down into a chain of smaller processes where they cross departmental, or even enterprise boundaries.