While some software transactions are simple, others require more maintenance. Long-running transactions in particular have become the bane of the microservices era, as they need careful stewardship to ensure successful completion. Developers have dealt with this problem for decades by writing extra code to manage more demanding transactions. Now, in the distributed world of microservices, they must tackle it again. So exploring this topic — and how modern execution platforms can help — offers a number of compelling insights.

How Do We Define “Long-Running Transaction” Anyway?

The simplest transactions are predictable, involving a straightforward request and response interaction. However, more complex transactions span multiple steps that can take different lengths of time to complete, especially when manual input is involved.