Understanding the difference between process managers and sagas
Saga and process managers are often mistaken to be the same, but they serve distinct purposes. While both handle business processes in distributed systems, they operate differently.
Both Saga and Process Manager are patterns designed to handle long-running, distributed transactions, ensuring consistency across multiple services. However, they differ significantly in how they coordinate the workflow and manage state transitions. The process manager topic is an extensive one and falls beyond the scope of this book. We will focus only on the Saga pattern and how it differs from Process Manager. As an example, Figure 12.6 shows how Process Manager would work applied to our ERP process.
Figure 12.6 – Process Manager for our ERP
An incoming message, usually called a trigger message, initializes the process. Based on the rules inside the process manager, it sends a message to the first service, or processing...
