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 Pa