The Saga Pattern

In enterprise applications, nearly every request is executed within a database transaction. 

Developers often use frameworks and libraries with declarative mechanisms to simplify transaction management.

The Spring framework, for example, uses a special annotation to arrange for method invocations to be automatically executed within a transaction. This annotation simplifies writing transactional business logic, making it easier to manage transactions in a monolithic application that accesses a single database.

However, while transaction management is relatively straightforward in a monolithic application accessing a single database, it becomes more complex in scenarios involving multiple databases and message brokers. 

For example, in a microservice architecture, business transactions span multiple services, each with its database. This complexity makes the traditional transaction approach impractical. Instead, microservices-based applications must adopt alternative mechanisms to manage transactions effectively.

In this post, we’ll learn why microservices-based applications require a more sophisticated approach to transaction management, such as using the Saga pattern. We’ll also understand the different approaches to implementing the Saga pattern in an application.

The Need for Saga Pattern