Saga Design Pattern in Microservices | Choreography vs Orchestration Explained

Quick visual guide to the Saga Pattern for distributed transactions in microservices. E-commerce example: Order → Payment → Inventory reservation, with compensating transactions on failure. Two approaches: Choreography (Event-Driven) – Services publish/subscribe to events, no central coordinator, loosely coupled Orchestration – Central Saga Orchestrator controls the workflow step-by-step and handles compensations Common compensations: RefundPayment, ReleaseStock, CancelOrder Ensures data consistency without traditional ACID distributed transactions — using compensation instead.