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Saga Pattern in Microservices: A Step-by-Step Guide
Introduction
In a distributed microservices architecture, ensuring data consistency across multiple services is one of the biggest challenges. The Saga Pattern is a design pattern used to manage distributed transactions in microservices, ensuring eventual consistency across different services.
This guide will break down the Saga Pattern in a simple and easy-to-understand way, using real-world examples and a fully working implementation with Spring Boot, Kafka, MySQL, and compensation logic.
For non-members, read this article for free on my blog: Saga Pattern in Microservices: A Step-by-Step Guide.
1️⃣ Understanding the Saga Pattern
When a business transaction spans multiple microservices, we need a way to ensure that all steps either complete successfully or rollback changes if something goes wrong. Instead of using traditional database transactions (ACID properties), which are hard to manage across services, we use the Saga Pattern, where each service performs its part and notifies the next service.
📌 Key Idea:
- Break a transaction into small independent steps.
- If any step fails, execute compensating actions to undo the previous steps.
- Ensures eventual consistency instead of strong consistency.
Types of Saga Implementation
1. Choreography-Based Saga (Event-Driven Approach)
- Each service publishes an event after it completes its work.
- Other services listen for these events and trigger the next step.
- No centralized controller.
2. Orchestration-Based Saga (Centralized Control)
- A Saga Orchestrator is responsible for managing all steps.
- It ensures that each step executes in sequence and handles rollbacks.
