[fortunaTemporal]

Author of the article here. Yeah, @agumonkey I like that analogy a lot!

Generally, that's a good way of thinking about it. The one additional bit of nuance is it's like a "safe" stack unwind while other processes could be still modifying databases at the same time, so it's not a complete "rollback" of the whole world if that makes sense.

[agumonkey]

Thanks, you're probably right, there's more to it. It's a thrilling topic, are there any other patterns, or abstractions into controlling "distributed state" (apologies if i'm twisting things too much again) between agents to keep things in a correct order ?

[fortunaTemporal]

One pattern is having a Workflow that runs as long as the lifetime of a domain object and holds a conceptual lock on that object—it receives requests to modify the object, and makes sure to only perform one operation at a time. (like the state pattern on a particular agent)

Also related: Signals are events that you can send to Workflows and between Workflows, and they’re always delivered in the order they’re received.

More generally, for a handy reference of Distributed Systems patterns, check out https://microservices.io/patterns/data/saga.html (though I personally find his diagrams a bit...overwhelming) and the MSN writeups: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/pattern...