Transaction Management in Microservices

In a monolithic application, a single database handles all transactions, ensuring data integrity with ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

With microservices, your business logic is split across many independent services, each often with its own database. This introduces significant challenges for managing transactions that span multiple services. How do you ensure an operation involving several services either fully completes or fully rolls back?

In a monolithic application, a single database ensures transactional integrity:

• All operations for a business transaction occur within one database.
• ACID properties are guaranteed by the database.

In microservices, each service usually owns its data:

• A single business transaction might involve multiple services and databases.
• Traditional ACID transactions cannot span these boundaries directly.