Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices - Caitie McCaffrey - JOTB17

Microservices have become the defacto architecture pattern for building services. However separating business logic into small services that operate with a single logical data set has introduced consistency challenges. Previous attempts to solve this problem like two phase commit have not been widely adopted due to availability and liveness issues. Instead developers implement feral concurrency control mechanism. This technique can be error prone, and often results in “Death Star” architectures which rely on chained calls to enforce application invariants. These architectures become more complicated over time, and are difficult to modify and extend, and often don't correctly handle all failure scenarios. In this talk I propose a new solution for this problem, Distributed Sagas, a protocol for coordinating requests among multiple micro services, while ensuring application invariants.