The Saga Pattern — Distributed Transactions
Learn choreography vs orchestration for distributed transactions, design compensating actions, and handle failures gracefully across services.
In a monolith, you wrap related operations in a database transaction: charge the credit card, reduce inventory, and create the shipping label — all succeed or all roll back. Clean and simple.
In a distributed system with separate services and databases, traditional transactions do not work. The payment service has its own database, the inventory service has its own, and the shipping service has its own. You cannot wrap a transaction across all three.
The Saga pattern is the solution: a sequence of local transactions coordinated through events or commands, where each step has a compensating action that undoes its effect if a later step fails.
Why Distributed Transactions Are Hard
The Two-Phase Commit Problem
The traditional approach to distributed transactions is two-phase comm
This lesson is part of the Guild Member curriculum. Plans start at $29/mo.