AWS Prescriptive Guidance - Cloud design patterns, architectures, and implementations

A saga consists of a sequence of local transactions. Each local transaction in a saga updates the database and triggers the next local transaction. If a transaction fails, the saga runs compensating transactions to revert the database changes made by the previous transactions.

The transactional outbox pattern resolves the dual write operations issue that occurs in distributed systems when a single operation involves both a database write operation and a message or event notification. A dual write operation occurs when an application writes to two different systems; for example, when a microservice needs to persist data in the database and send a message to notify other systems. A failure in one of these operations might result in inconsistent data.