Saga Pattern Technologies: A Criteria-based Evaluation

One challenge in Microservices Architectures is coordinating business workflows between services, for which the Saga pattern is frequently mentioned as a solution in the literature. This work presents a criteria catalog based on which existing technological solutions that help with Saga implementations can be qualitatively evaluated to enable an informed decision between them. It considers criteria relevant for the Saga pattern, microservices characteristics, and for operating a system in production. We use it to evaluate four technological solutions by implementing an exemplary use case. Due to their different origins, the technologies come with varying strengths and weaknesses and as a result no solution is superior. The results can help developers decide which technology to use and provide insights into what to consider when implementing the Saga pattern.