integration-pattern-selection

Choosing the right integration pattern requires evaluating trade-offs in consistency, latency, ownership boundaries, and existing infrastructure to select between sync, async, saga, outbox, CDC, polling, or webhook approaches for your services.

Use saga orchestration when a central controller is needed to manage distributed transactions, and choose choreography when services react to events independently, with the decision driven by your specific workflow complexity and ownership boundaries.

The outbox pattern is needed for reliable data flow when you must guarantee event delivery alongside database updates, preventing data inconsistency in distributed systems without distributed transaction support.

Handling idempotency and retries requires applying anti-pattern checks during pattern selection to ensure the chosen sync, async, or webhook approach safely manages duplicate requests and failures through dead letter queues (DLQs).

Yes, this integration pattern selection framework works for both simple and complex workflows by applying phase-based evaluation and structured catalog decisions to guide pattern choice across varying multi-service architectures.

You should avoid synchronous integration for high-latency architectures because it tightens coupling and exhausts latency budgets, making asynchronous patterns, CDC, or webbooks better choices for maintaining performance under load.