antigravity-skills-reference/skills/saga-orchestration/resources/implementation-playbook.md

Saga Orchestration Playbook

When to choose orchestration vs choreography

• Choose orchestration when business flow visibility and centralized control are required.
• Choose choreography when autonomy is high and coupling is low.

Saga design checklist

• Define explicit saga state machine.
• Define timeout policy per step.
• Define compensation action for each irreversible step.
• Use idempotency keys for command handling.
• Store correlation IDs across all events and logs.

Failure handling

• Retry transient failures with bounded exponential backoff.
• Escalate non-recoverable failures to compensation state.
• Capture operator-visible failure reason and current step.

Verification

• Simulate failure at every step and confirm compensation path.
• Validate duplicate message handling.
• Validate recovery from orchestrator restart.