SagaMAS: A Software Framework for Distributed Transactions in the Microservice Architecture

This paper introduces SagaMAS: a Multi-Agent based framework on development, dealing with distributed transactions in the microservices architecture. Microservices are an architectural style where the distributed system is decomposed in a series of highly cohesive and independent services. Each microservice can have different implementations and data persistence technologies, resulting in heterogeneous distributed systems. Given its heterogeneity and distributed nature, an open challenge in this architecture is the proper management of distributed transactions that expand through several microservices. Multi-Agent Systems are by definition distributed systems suited for complex coordination tasks, such as this. The proposed framework can be seen as a decoupled autonomous layer that coordinates the distributed transactions of the system, relieving the microservice developer from such tasks, and simplifying microservice interactions. Unlike existing approaches, our proposal is conceived and usable at an abstraction level appropriate to express reliability and robustness issues in terms of agent coordination.