workflow-orchestration-patterns

The saga pattern implements distributed transactions with compensation logic for reliable rollbacks. You need it when orchestrating complex distributed processes like order fulfillment, ensuring steps complete successfully or are compensated on failure.

To separate workflow and activity logic in Temporal, distinguish between orchestrating durable business logic and executing external side effects. Workflows manage the state and sequence, while activities handle non-deterministic operations like API calls or database updates.

Build fault tolerance and resilience into distributed workflows by leveraging automatic state preservation, configuring retry policies, and implementing idempotency. These mechanisms ensure long-running processes recover automatically from transient failures without data corruption.

Yes, you can use entity workflows to manage the lifecycle of individual entities with persistent state in microservice orchestration. This pattern provides a durable execution layer for tracking specific domain objects across long-running distributed transactions.

The best way to handle complex order fulfillment across microservices is using a durable workflow orchestrator. This coordinates inventory reservation, payment processing, and shipping, ensuring reliable compensation logic triggers if any step fails.

Long-running distributed processes fail due to network timeouts, service crashes, or race conditions. Idempotency helps by ensuring retries execute external activities safely without causing duplicate side effects, maintaining workflow consistency.