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0004-saga-orchestration-vs-choreography.md

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0004-saga-orchestration-vs-choreography.md

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ADR-0004: Orchestration-based SAGA for settlement

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-06-22

Context

Settlement spans multiple services and an external rail: reserve funds, post to the ledger, notify the rail, confirm. There is no distributed ACID transaction across these boundaries; partial failure must be handled with compensating actions.

Decision

Use an orchestration-based SAGA: a single coordinator (SettlementSaga) drives each step, persists state (saga_instance) for crash recovery, and runs compensations in reverse order on failure (a rail rejection after the ledger posted triggers a ledger reversal). Orchestration is chosen over choreography because the workflow is non-trivial and we want one place to reason about state, timeouts, and compensation.

The companion pricing-orchestration repo intentionally demonstrates the choreography variant for contrast.

Consequences

  • Positive: explicit, observable workflow; centralized compensation logic; recoverable.
  • Negative: the orchestrator is a potential coupling point; must avoid it becoming a god-service.
  • Compensations are business-level (a reversal entry), never a hard delete -- correct for finance.