Mastering the Saga Pattern: Achieving Data Consistency in Microservices

A transaction represents a unit of work, which can include multiple operations. In a monolith, placing an order is easy: you wrap your database calls in one @Transactional block. It's "all or nothing." But in microservices, the Inventory Service, Payment Service, and Shipping Service each have their own databases. You can't use a single transaction across network boundaries. If the Shipping Service fails after the Payment Service has already taken the customer's money, how do you fix it? This is where Saga Design Pattern is useful. 1 What is a Saga? The Saga design pattern helps maintain data consistency in distributed systems by coordinating transactions across multiple services. A saga is a sequence of local transactions where each service performs its operation and initiates the next step through events or messages. If a step in the sequence fails, the saga performs compensating transactions to undo the completed steps. This approach helps maintain data consistency. The Saga Pattern