Architecture & ModernizationTools-in-Action30min
Solving Distributed Transactions with the Saga Pattern and Temporal
This talk examines real-world challenges of implementing distributed transactions with Temporal. It covers pitfalls of classic Saga patterns, especially for synchronous workflows, failures, retries, and compensation, and explains how the architecture evolved to improve reliability, reconciliation, and consistency in production distributed systems.
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Andrei SulyzSkyro
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Tuesday, October 6, 16:50-17:20
TBA 6
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Detailed Description
Temporal makes it remarkably easy to implement long-running business workflows. But once those workflows span multiple services and require synchronous business decisions, straightforward Saga implementations quickly expose non-obvious problems.
We'll explore the challenges we encountered while building distributed transactions with Temporal in a real production system. Starting with a classic Saga implementation, we'll examine why it wasn't enough, what problems emerged around synchronous workflows, failures, retries, and compensation, and how the architecture evolved to address them. We'll also discuss reconciliation, consistency guarantees, and the trade-offs between keeping workflows simple and building resilient distributed systems.
Key Takeaways
• Common pitfalls when implementing Saga with Temporal.
• Designing reliable synchronous workflows.
Target Audience
Backend engineers, software architects, and tech leads building distributed systems or using Temporal for business workflow orchestration.
Temporal makes it remarkably easy to implement long-running business workflows. But once those workflows span multiple services and require synchronous business decisions, straightforward Saga implementations quickly expose non-obvious problems.
We'll explore the challenges we encountered while building distributed transactions with Temporal in a real production system. Starting with a classic Saga implementation, we'll examine why it wasn't enough, what problems emerged around synchronous workflows, failures, retries, and compensation, and how the architecture evolved to address them. We'll also discuss reconciliation, consistency guarantees, and the trade-offs between keeping workflows simple and building resilient distributed systems.
Key Takeaways
• Common pitfalls when implementing Saga with Temporal.
• Designing reliable synchronous workflows.
Target Audience
Backend engineers, software architects, and tech leads building distributed systems or using Temporal for business workflow orchestration.
Andrei Sulyz
Andrei Sulyz is a Technical Lead with 10 years of experience building distributed systems across startups and enterprise environments. He currently works on the processing platform of a fintech company, designing backend systems for financial transactions and core platform services. His focus is distributed systems, backend architecture and developer productivity. Andrei has led the adoption of Temporal from initial evaluation to production and is now building AI agents that automate software development workflows. He enjoys understanding how technologies work under the hood and sharing practical lessons from real production experience.