[paulmd]

As mentioned this is a distributed system though, and realistically most micro services etc aren’t being fully rigorous about multi-phase transactionality and proper rollbacks etc.

Realistically it is the norm to yolo updates at a service and if it fails then the whole thing 500s and things are just in an unexpected state. Often it is not even possible to guarantee successful rollback etc - if your update back to original state fails then what is the application state now? Undefined and potentially invalid, pretty much. Most people just replay the request again and hope it succeeds.

Obviously the right answer is “don’t do that” or “offload that complexity into graphQL or something” but in the real world… people don’t.