Use of Transactions within a Reactive Microservices Environment

Transaction processing is an inherent part of application development. However, particularly in the distributed environment, the utilization of transactions introduces several challenges that transaction management must be able to handle. Microservices represent an emerging architectural style for the modern distributed application design. These applications commonly address similar concerns to stay responsive, elastic and resilient which is why the use of traditional locking transaction commit protocols may not be acceptable. The saga pattern presents a suitable alternative solution to transaction processing that relaxes some of the ACID properties in order to promote availability. In this work, we examine how sagas differ from conventional transactions, investigate currently available saga solutions and propose a saga execution implementation for the Narayana transaction manager.