We’ve been implementing the saga pattern for six months. We started with choreography — each service reacts to events. It worked up to 5 services. Then chaos arrived.
Choreography — Decentralized Coordination¶
Each service listens to events and reacts. No central coordinator. Advantage: loose coupling. Disadvantage: distributed logic — nobody sees the full flow. Debugging is a nightmare. “Where did that order get stuck?”
Orchestration — Central Coordinator¶
An orchestrator (saga coordinator) controls the entire flow. Sends commands to services, waits for responses, decides on compensations. Advantage: visibility into the full flow, easier debugging. Disadvantage: single point of failure, tighter coupling.
Our Hybrid Model¶
Simple flows (2–3 steps) → choreography. Complex flows (4+ steps, branching, timeouts) → orchestration via Temporal.io. Temporal: a workflow engine with durable execution, automatic retries, and full visibility.
There Is No “Right” Approach¶
Choreography for simple, orchestration for complex. Most systems need both.
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