This pattern has a similar goal with two-phase commit (XA transaction)
This pattern is used in distributed services to perform a group of operations atomically. This is an analog of transaction in a database but in terms of microservices architecture this is executed in a distributed environment
A saga is a sequence of local transactions in a certain context. If one transaction fails for some reason, the saga executes compensating transactions(rollbacks) to undo the impact of the preceding transactions. There are two types of Saga:
Choreography-Based Saga. In this approach, there is no central orchestrator. Each service participating in the Saga performs their transaction and publish events. The other services act upon those events and perform their transactions. Also, they may or not publish other events based on the situation.
Orchestration-Based Saga In this approach, there is a Saga orchestrator that manages all the transactions and directs the participant services to execute local transactions based on events. This orchestrator can also be though of as a Saga Manager.
Use the Saga pattern, if: