What is the Saga Pattern?
Learn the definition and purpose of the Saga pattern for managing business transactions that span multiple services.
Why Distributed Transactions?
In a microservices architecture, a single business operation often needs to interact with multiple independent services and their databases.
Traditional database transactions (known as ACID transactions) are great for ensuring consistency within a single database. However, they don't easily span across different services or databases.
The Challenge of Atomicity
Imagine an online purchase: an order is created, payment is processed, and inventory is updated. What if the payment succeeds but the inventory update fails?
Without a mechanism to coordinate these steps, your system could end up in an inconsistent state, like a customer paying for an item that's still in stock but not assigned to their order.