[platz]

For a process that is inherently sequentially dependent on previous results, how is this not a transaction other than declaring it not so or 'dropping the outcome all over the floor' if there's a problem?

It's kind of like saying, "You're not allowed to have this problem, you be better off if you had some other problem like the one I have here"

Unless you're just saying to "grow the boundary" until all parts of the sequentially dependent process is inside the boundary? (this may be tricky to deal with the more external systems there are that cannot be "internalized")

* I am not saying you need distributed transactions - just that some processes cannot easily be encapsulated as "atomic" operations.