I'm currently working with a distributed system composed of multiple microservices, some of which communicate via RESTful APIs and others through asynchronous messaging (Kafka).

My current challenge is maintaining data consistency and transactional integrity across services without introducing tight coupling or relying on a monolithic orchestrator. I've researched patterns like:

Saga pattern (both orchestrated and choreographed)

Outbox pattern

Event sourcing

However, the hybrid nature of my architecture makes implementation tricky:

Some services must respond immediately (sync over REST), while others rely on eventual consistency (async over Kafka).

Rollbacks in orchestrated sagas risk becoming overly complex and difficult to trace.

Choreographed sagas lead to implicit coupling that becomes hard to track as the system grows.

Introducing event sourcing introduces operational complexity I’d like to avoid unless it’s clearly the right direction.

My question is:

How can I reliably coordinate transactions across these microservices, ensuring both consistency and loose coupling, given the constraints of a hybrid (REST + Event-Driven) architecture?

Are there hybrid strategies or practical architectural tips to design this kind of system gracefully? I’m especially interested in battle-tested approaches from those who’ve deployed systems like this to production.

Tech Stack (if relevant): .NET 8 (C#) Kafka (Confluent) PostgreSQL Docker + Kubernetes

Thanks in advance—looking forward to nuanced takes from those who’ve wrestled with this in the wild.

I'm currently working with a distributed system composed of multiple microservices, some of which communicate via RESTful APIs and others through asynchronous messaging (Kafka).

My current challenge is maintaining data consistency and transactional integrity across services without introducing tight coupling or relying on a monolithic orchestrator. I've researched patterns like:

Saga pattern (both orchestrated and choreographed)

Outbox pattern

Event sourcing

However, the hybrid nature of my architecture makes implementation tricky:

Some services must respond immediately (sync over REST), while others rely on eventual consistency (async over Kafka).

Rollbacks in orchestrated sagas risk becoming overly complex and difficult to trace.

Choreographed sagas lead to implicit coupling that becomes hard to track as the system grows.

Introducing event sourcing introduces operational complexity I’d like to avoid unless it’s clearly the right direction.

My question is:

How can I reliably coordinate transactions across these microservices, ensuring both consistency and loose coupling, given the constraints of a hybrid (REST + Event-Driven) architecture?

Are there hybrid strategies or practical architectural tips to design this kind of system gracefully? I’m especially interested in battle-tested approaches from those who’ve deployed systems like this to production.

Tech Stack (if relevant): .NET 8 (C#) Kafka (Confluent) PostgreSQL Docker + Kubernetes

Thanks in advance—looking forward to nuanced takes from those who’ve wrestled with this in the wild.

• design-patterns

1 Answer 1

You can rely on non-monolythic orchestrator like temporal.io. This allows maintaining decoupled microservice architecture and support both synchronous and asynchronous service APIs.

The Nexus-RPC can be used to get rid of Event Driven Architecture for the most of the interservice communication. Think about it as RPC that can take any amount of time. It is asynchronousl at the backend, but as a developer you get a nice request-reply abstraction.