Why it matters

Ordering shapes correctness. Understanding shapes design.

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The architecture

Total order: single sequence.

Partial order: parallelism allowed.

Causal ordering: happens-before.

Ordering typesTotal orderone sequencePartial orderparallelism allowedCausal orderhappens-beforeKafka partition-per-key gives per-key ordering; global ordering trades throughput
Workflow ordering.
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How it works end to end

Kafka: per-partition ordering.

Vector clocks for causal.

Sequencer patterns.

Idempotency helps out-of-order.