The Saga Pattern: Managing Distributed Transactions Without Losing Your Mind

Imagine it's Friday. 4:15 PM. You've just deployed the new "Order-to-Delivery" microservice flow. Service A calls Service B, B calls C. It's elegant. It's "decoupled." You go home and feel like a cloud-native architect. Then, at 2 AM, the pager goes off. A customer bought a $2,000 espresso machine. Service A created the record. Service B charged the card. But Service C was having a moment because…