Orchestration Architectures
Hub-spoke, pipeline, swarm — choosing the right structure for your agent team.
What You'll Learn
- The three core orchestration architectures
- How to pick the right architecture for your use case
- Trade-offs: control vs. flexibility vs. complexity
- Hybrid architectures for real-world systems
Hub-Spoke: The Central Commander
One orchestrator agent sits at the center. It receives tasks, breaks them down, delegates to specialist agents, collects results, and assembles the final output. Every message flows through the hub.
Strengths: Easy to reason about, clear chain of command, simple debugging. You always know who's in charge.
Weaknesses: The hub is a bottleneck and a single point of failure. If it gets confused, the whole system breaks.
Use when: You need tight control, the workflow is well-defined, and you have fewer than 5-6 agents.
Pipeline: The Assembly Line
Agents are arranged in sequence. Each one processes the input, transforms it, and passes it to the next. No central controller — the flow is baked into the structure itself. Like a factory assembly line where each station adds value.
Strengths: Simple, predictable, easy to test each stage independently. Adding a new step is just inserting a new agent.
Weaknesses: No flexibility for branching logic. If step 3 needs to go back to step 1, the architecture fights you.
Use when: Your workflow is truly linear — research, then write, then edit, then publish. No loops, no branches.
Swarm: The Autonomous Collective
No central controller. Agents operate independently, communicating peer-to-peer. They self-organize based on the current state of the work. Like a flock of birds — no leader, but the group moves with purpose.
Strengths: Highly resilient, scales naturally, can handle unpredictable workflows. If one agent fails, others adapt.
Weaknesses: Hard to debug, unpredictable behavior, potential for agents to conflict or duplicate work.
Use when: The problem space is dynamic, you need maximum resilience, and you can tolerate some unpredictability.
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