Logan, the lead architect for Penultimate Electronics, interrupted a small group of architects in the cafeteria, discussing distributed architectures. “Austen, are you wearing a cast again?”
“No, it’s just a splint,” replied Austen. “I sprained my wrist playing extreme disc golf over the weekend—it’s almost healed.”
“What is…never mind. What is this impassioned conversation I barged in on?”
“Why wouldn’t someone always choose the saga pattern in microservices to wire together transactions?” asked Austen. “That way, architects can make the services as small as they want.”
“But don’t you have to use orchestration with sagas?” asked Addison. “What about times when we need asynchronous communication? And, how complex will the transactions get? If we break things down too much, can we really guarantee data fidelity?”
“You know,” said Austen, “if we use an enterprise service bus, we can get it to manage most of that stuff for us.”
“I thought no one used ESBs anymore—shouldn’t we use Kafka for stuff like that?”
“They aren’t even the same thing!” said Austen.
Logan interrupted the increasingly heated conversation. “It is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but none of these tools or approaches is a silver bullet. Distributed architectures like microservices are difficult, especially if architects cannot untangle all the forces at play. What we need is an approach or framework that helps us figure out the ...
