Concepts

These pages give you the mental model before, or instead of, doing. Each defines one thing, says what problem it solves, shows how it works with a minimal example, and states its boundaries. None of them is a procedure; the guides they link to are.

Start with How Orion works: the three primitives, one request’s journey through the engine, and the five places the runtime can be extended.

Then the primitives, one page each. A channel is where traffic arrives and what contract a caller must satisfy. A workflow is the ordered pipeline of tasks a channel runs. A connector is a named connection to an external system that workflows reference by name.

Two pages cover governance. The entity lifecycle is the one-way path from draft to active to archived that every versioned entity follows. Packages are the unit a service ships as, from one instance to another.

Two pages cover the extension points. A plugin adds a task function as a sandboxed WebAssembly component. A model adds an ONNX graph, admitted by the node before it serves.

Three pages are maps. Architectural characteristics lists everything the runtime carries, by quality attribute. Design notes hold the reasoning behind rules that look arbitrary until you read the argument. The glossary defines every term the book uses with a fixed meaning.

Last verified 14 September 2026