Seata is a distributed transaction coordinator designed to ensure data consistency and atomicity across microservices. It provides a centralized framework for managing global transactions, preventing partial data updates across different databases and services.
The project implements multiple transaction modes to balance consistency and performance. This includes an automatic mode that uses rollback logs to coordinate compensation without modifying business logic, a try-confirm-cancel pattern for resources lacking native ACID support, and a saga orchestration engine for managing long-lived business processes through eventual consistency. It also supports strict atomic execution for databases that implement the XA protocol.
The system features a decoupled compute-storage architecture to enable horizontal scaling of coordinator nodes and a distributed configuration center for real-time synchronization across clusters. It includes capabilities for multi-tenant isolation, namespace environment separation, and a visual workflow designer for modeling transaction sequences.
The framework integrates with various RPC frameworks and uses gRPC for bidirectional streaming between clients and coordinators.