Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

Compensating Transaction pattern

This pattern tries to solve a problem of a typical distributed system—transactional consistency.

A transaction could be defined as an action (or a series of coordinated actions) performed to fulfill a business functionality. This pattern tries to solve one of the problems of a typical distributed system—transactional consistency. In a distributed system (such as a cloud-based architecture), it's always very difficult to guarantee the consistency of a long-running transaction, so the idea of this pattern is to use a series of smaller individual transactions that can be undone (compensating transactions). In the Compensating Transaction pattern, the steps of a compensating transaction must undo the steps in ...