Saga Pattern
A way to manage distributed transactions across microservices using a sequence of local transactions with compensating actions for rollback.
What is Saga Pattern?
A way to manage distributed transactions across microservices using a sequence of local transactions with compensating actions for rollback.
Saga Pattern is a advanced concept that sits in the Distributed Systems Core area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Saga Pattern" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
CQRS
Command Query Responsibility Segregation: using different models for reading and writing data. Reads and writes have different performance needs, so separate them.
Event Sourcing
Storing every state change as an immutable event instead of just the current state. You can rebuild any past state by replaying events.
Two-Phase Commit
A protocol ensuring all nodes in a distributed transaction either commit or abort together. Phase 1: prepare (vote). Phase 2: commit or rollback.