Checkout involves three services, orders, payments and inventory, and each has its own database. How do you keep the data consistent if one of the steps fails?
~10 min by voice
How to approach it
The interviewer checks whether the candidate understands how to keep services consistent without a distributed transaction. What matters is whether they can design a saga that survives failures: with idempotency, reliable command delivery, the right order of steps, and a plan for when a rollback fails.
The interviewer will ask this question and listen. Think out loud and ask for a hint if you need one. When you're done, pause or tap “That's my answer”. In about a minute, your score and the points you covered show up here.