RTS Questionnaire · Question 35 of 52 · file: answers/q35.html
Have you worked on systems involving distributed transactions?
DistributedTransactionsArchitecture
✅ Yes — I have designed and implemented consistency across multiple services and databases, using saga-style coordination rather than fragile two-phase commit.
🧪 Interactive proof: this answer has its own page with a live consistency workflow, the orchestrated saga with its compensations, the outbox relay and the reconciliation job behind it — open the Q35 distributed-transactions proof →
Technical detail
- 🔄 Saga pattern — orchestration (a coordinator/handler drives the steps) and choreography (services react to events) to model long-running business processes such as payments, reservations, order fulfilment and claims, each step paired with an explicit compensating action.
- 📤 Transactional Outbox — business data and outgoing events committed in the same local transaction, then published to Kafka/RabbitMQ/Service Bus by a relay; guarantees no lost or phantom events without distributed locks.
- 📥 Idempotency and exactly-once effects — idempotency keys, deduplication tables, unique constraints and conditional writes so retried or duplicated messages (at-least-once delivery) never double-charge or double-create.
- 🧪 Consistency engineering — eventual consistency with read-your-writes handling where UX demands it, reconciliation/repair jobs, timeouts and compensating timeouts, poison-message handling with DLQs, and distributed tracing to follow a business transaction across services.
- ⚖️ When 2PC still matters — inside a single transactional resource (one database, or
TransactionScopeover tightly coupled resources) I use local ACID transactions; across service boundaries I replace locking with compensation and idempotency because 2PC does not scale and couples availability.
🧾 CV evidence: CV: AWS Event Driven Architectural Microservice, MQ Systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ), Oracle SOA Suite/BPEL orchestration and BPEL/BPM process services in banking and government integrations.