Sagas in Erlang: Distributed Transactions Without Locks
summary
Claims that sagas give transactional semantics across arbitrarily distributed services without locks and implements them in Erlang by folding over closures, with compensating rollback closures and checkpoints. Tools and artifacts include an open source Gflow library on GitHub, a small future abstraction called Criswell futures, and property‑based tests (QuickCheck/proper style). A concrete use case is creating 50 cloud nodes; implementation spawns each operation, monitors failures, reverses the executed list and replays compensations, and assumes rollbacks cannot abort.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:04Sagas
- 6:47FoldL
- 9:47Gflow
- 12:05Terminology
- 13:36Operations
- 15:31Assumptions
- 17:25Compensating Transactions
- 18:32Futures
- 18:50Criswell
- 20:13Semantics
- 21:54Property Based Testing
- 22:38QuickCheck
- 23:42Macros
- 24:55Resources
- 25:51Failure
- 28:18Unwind
- 29:15Checkpointing
- 30:22Dependencies
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