Have you had experience with distributed transactions in microservices architecture?

Distributed transactions in microservices architecture are used to ensure data consistency when performing operations that involve multiple services. Unlike monolithic applications, where a transaction can cover the entire database, in microservices, data is distributed, and standard ACID transactions are not always applicable.

Experience with distributed transactions typically includes understanding and using patterns such as:

• Two-Phase Commit (2PC) — a classic consensus protocol, but often complex and impacting performance.
• Saga — a more popular approach, where a transaction is broken into a series of local transactions with compensating actions in case of errors.

For example, when placing an order, one service reserves the product, another deducts money, and a third updates the order status. If one step fails, compensating operations are performed to rollback previous actions.

In practice, it is important to consider that distributed transactions complicate the system, can reduce performance, and require careful design to ensure fault tolerance and consistency. Therefore, the Saga pattern is often preferred, and systems are designed considering eventual consistency.