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The Saga pattern is an architectural concept for distributed systems that models a business workflow as a sequence of local transactions. Each local transaction commits independently and triggers compensating actions on failure to restore overall state. This enables eventual consistency without a central, blocking two‑phase commit.
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A saga coordinates a distributed business transaction as a sequence of local transactions and compensates completed steps when a later step fails.
The Saga pattern was formulated for long-running transactions in distributed systems where one global ACID transaction across services is impractical. Microservices.io describes choreography and orchestration as two coordination approaches.
An order may reserve inventory, authorise payment, and create shipping. Each service commits its local transaction; if a later step fails, the saga runs business compensations such as releasing the reservation. Compensation is a new transaction, not a rewind: intermediate states, retries, duplicates, and effects that cannot be undone must be designed for.
Each service commits its own atomic transaction and then publishes an event or result.
A business counter-action offsets the effect of a completed step where that is possible.
Choreography distributes reactions through events; orchestration centralises them in a coordinator.
Sagas enable resilient business flows across service boundaries. They also add consistency, failure-handling, and observability complexity, so business compensations must be defined explicitly.
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