Guided Lab Brief

Transactions & Isolation in Practice

Design a checkout flow that keeps correctness under retries, async workers, and partial failures.

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Overview

Design a checkout flow that keeps correctness under retries, async workers, and partial failures.

Correctness breaks when systems retry.

You will build 7 architecture steps that model production dependencies.

You will run 1 failure experiment to observe bottlenecks and recovery behavior.

Success target: Order commit remains correct under retries; downstream failures are compensated without double-processing.

Learning Objectives

  • Can defend transactional boundaries in distributed systems
  • Can explain idempotency and saga compensation with concrete components
  • Can discuss queue guarantee tradeoffs confidently

Experiments

  1. Switch queue to at-most-once and observe irreversible order gaps

Failure Modes to Trigger

  • Trigger: Switch queue to at-most-once and observe irreversible order gaps

    Observe: Some committed orders never reach workers, leaving orders stuck in pending states with no side effects.

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