The distributed sagas pattern and the compensating transaction pattern are similar in nature. Both patterns offer eventual consistency in the system at some point in the future when distributed transactions are performed. These patterns do not support ACID transactions across microservices. These patterns require a compensating action for each of the actions performed during the distributed transaction to maintain consistency. These compensating actions are executed when the respective transaction action fails and triggers the execution of a chain of compensating actions to reverse or semantically undo the executed steps prior to the failure.
We'll look at compensating actions in more depth in the following section.
