System Design

Distributed Transactions Part 3: The Saga Pattern

Consistency without distributed locks. Learn about Choreography vs. Orchestration and how to handle failures with compensating transactions.

Sachin Sarawgi·April 20, 2026·1 min read
#saga-pattern#microservices#consistency#distributed-systems

Part 3: The Saga Pattern

Since we can't lock resources across services, we use the Saga Pattern. A Saga is a sequence of local transactions where each step has a Compensating Transaction to undo its work.

1. Two Architectures

  • Choreography: Services talk to each other via events. Best for simple flows.
  • Orchestration: A central state machine manages the flow. Best for complex business logic.

2. Handling Failure

If "Payment Service" fails, the Saga triggers a "Release Inventory" command to the "Inventory Service." This is Eventual Consistency in action.


Next: Part 4: The Transactional Outbox

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Sachin Sarawgi

Written by

Sachin Sarawgi

Engineering Manager and backend engineer with 10+ years building distributed systems across fintech, enterprise SaaS, and startups. CodeSprintPro is where I write practical guides on system design, Java, Kafka, databases, AI infrastructure, and production reliability.

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