Spring Boot Saga Pattern

This handles distributed transactions across microservices without the coordination overhead of two-phase commit. You get implementations for both choreography (event-driven with Kafka or RabbitMQ) and orchestration (centralized coordinator), with the key insight that every forward transaction needs an idempotent compensating action. The approach maps out transaction flows like Order → Payment → Inventory with corresponding Cancel → Refund → Release paths. Best suited when you're past the monolith stage and need eventual consistency across services that can't share a database. The emphasis on idempotency and persistent saga state is right, because in distributed systems things will fail and retry constantly.