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Implement saga patterns for distributed transactions and cross-aggregate workflows. Use this skill when implementing distributed transactions across microservices where 2PC is unavailable, designing c
The skill file stays in the publisher's repository.
Paste the copied command in a terminal. It installs this SKILL.md into that agent.
npx skills add wshobson/agents --skill saga-orchestration -a cursor -y
Implement saga patterns for distributed transactions and cross-aggregate workflows. Use this skill when implementing distributed transactions across microservices where 2PC is unavailable, designing compensating actions for failed order workflows that span inventory, payment, and shipping services, building event-driven saga coordinators for travel booking systems that must roll back hotel, flight, and car rental reservations atomically, or debugging stuck saga states in production where compensation steps never complete.
Implement saga patterns for distributed transactions and cross-aggregate workflows. Use this skill when implementing distributed transactions across microservices where 2PC is unavailable, designing compensating actions for failed order workflows that span inventory, payment, and shipping services, building event-driven saga coordinators for travel booking systems that must roll back hotel, flight, and car rental reservations atomically, or debugging stuck saga states in production where compensation steps never complete.
Patterns for managing distributed transactions and long-running business processes without two-phase commit.
What you provide:
What this skill produces:
Moved to references/details.md.
Moved to references/details.md.
saga_id must flow through every event and logsaga_id, step_name, old_state → new_state on every changeA saga enters compensation but never reaches FAILED. This means a compensation handler is throwing an unhandled exception and never publishing SagaCompensationCompleted. Add dead-letter queue (DLQ) handling to compensation consumers and ensure every compensation action publishes a result event even when the underlying operation was already rolled back.
async def handle_release_reservation(self, command: Dict):
try:
await self.release_reservation(command["original_result"]["reservation_id"])
except ReservationNotFoundError:
pass # Already released — treat as success
# Always publish completion, regardless of outcome
await self.event_publisher.publish("SagaCompensationCompleted", {
"saga_id": command["saga_id"],
"step_name": "reserve_inventory"
})
If your orchestrator service restarts mid-saga, it may replay events and re-execute already-completed steps. Guard every step action with an idempotency key — see Template 3 above.
In a choreography-based saga, a downstream service may miss an event if it was offline when published. Use a durable message broker (Kafka with replication, RabbitMQ with persistence) and store the current saga state in a dedicated saga_log table so you can replay from the last known good step.
A step like create_shipment might take up to 15 minutes during peak load but your global timeout is 5 minutes, causing spurious compensation. Make step timeouts configurable per step type — see references/advanced-patterns.md for the TimeoutSagaOrchestrator implementation and the STEP_TIMEOUTS dict pattern.
When two steps both complete before a failure is detected, compensation must run in strict reverse order or you leave data in an inconsistent state. Verify that _compensate() iterates from current_step - 1 down to 0, and add an integration test that deliberately fails at each step index to confirm correct rollback order.
The references/ directory contains production-grade implementations not needed for most sagas:
references/advanced-patterns.md — Full SagaOrchestrator abstract base class, TimeoutSagaOrchestrator with per-step deadlines, detailed bank transfer compensating transaction chain, Prometheus instrumentation, stuck saga PromQL alerts, and DLQ recovery worker.cqrs-implementation — Pair sagas with CQRS for read-model updates after each step completesevent-store-design — Store saga events in an event store for full audit trail and replay capabilityworkflow-orchestration-patterns — Higher-level workflow engines (Temporal, Conductor) that build on saga concepts