workflow-orchestration-patterns

You implement the saga pattern for distributed transactions by orchestrating a sequence of steps with defined compensation logic. If a step fails, compensation triggers a rollback of previously completed steps to maintain system consistency.

Workflows contain purely deterministic orchestration logic and state management, while activities handle all external system interactions like API calls. This separation ensures reliable state recovery and prevents non-deterministic errors during long-running distributed processes.

Error handling in distributed workflows relies on configuring retry policies, ensuring activity idempotency, and utilizing activity heartbeats. These mechanisms combined guarantee that transient failures in microservices do not permanently break long-running processes.

The best way to execute parallel tasks is using the fan-out/fan-in execution pattern. This distributes concurrent tasks across multiple microservices and aggregates the results back into the main workflow for final state processing.

You should use entity workflows when you need to manage the entire lifecycle of individual entities as long-lived, stateful processes. This approach provides durable state tracking and concurrent control for specific business objects in distributed systems.