Reliable workflows are not built by pretending every step will succeed. They are built by making failure a first-class state with a clear owner, recovery path and audit trail.
Start with explicit state transitions. Every transition should be idempotent, observable and safe to retry. This turns a vague sequence of API calls into a system operators can reason about.
Use queues when work must survive process restarts, but keep orchestration logic separate from transport. That boundary makes the workflow testable without requiring infrastructure in every unit test.
Finally, expose enough context for recovery: correlation IDs, structured errors and the last valid state. The best reliability feature is often a clear answer to “what happened?”