Apache Seata (incubating): Simple Extensible Autonomous Transaction Architecture

What is Apache Seata (incubating)?

A distributed transaction solution with high performance and ease of use for microservices architecture.

Distributed Transaction Problem in Microservices

Let's imagine a traditional monolithic application. Its business is built up with 3 modules. They use a single local data source.

Naturally, data consistency will be guaranteed by the local transaction.

Things have changed in a microservices architecture. The 3 modules mentioned above are designed to be 3 services on top of 3 different data sources (Pattern: Database per service). Data consistency within every single service is naturally guaranteed by the local transaction.

But how about the whole business logic scope?

Architecture

Apache Seata offers a robust solution to the distributed transaction challenges in microservices.

Core Concepts

A Distributed Transaction is a Global Transaction composed of a batch of Branch Transactions, where a Branch Transaction is typically a Local Transaction.

Roles

There are three main roles in the Apache Seata Framework:

• Transaction Coordinator(TC): Maintain status of global and branch transactions, drive the global commit or rollback.
• Transaction Manager(TM): Define the scope of global transaction: begin a global transaction, commit or rollback a global transaction.
• Resource Manager(RM): Manage resources that branch transactions working on, talk to TC for registering branch transactions and reporting status of branch transactions, and drive the branch transaction commit or rollback.

Transaction Lifecycle

A typical lifecycle of an Apache Seata managed distributed transaction:

1. TM asks TC to begin a new global transaction. TC generates an XID representing the global transaction.
2. XID is propagated through microservices' invoke chain.
3. RM registers local transaction as a branch of the corresponding global transaction of XID to TC.
4. TM asks TC for committing or rollbacking the corresponding global transaction of XID.
5. TC drives all branch transactions under the corresponding global transaction of XID to finish branch committing or rollbacking.

For more details about principle and design, please go to Apache Seata wiki page.

History

Alibaba

• TXC: Taobao Transaction Constructor. Alibaba middleware team started this project since 2014 to meet the distributed transaction problems caused by application architecture change from monolithic to microservices.
• GTS: Global Transaction Service. TXC as an Aliyun middleware product with new name GTS was published since 2016.
• Fescar: we started the open source project Fescar based on TXC/GTS since 2019 to work closely with the community in the future.

Ant Financial

• XTS: Extended Transaction Service. Ant Financial middleware team developed the distributed transaction middleware since 2007, which is widely used in Ant Financial and solves the problems of data consistency across databases and services.

• DTX: Distributed Transaction Extended. Since 2013, XTS has been published on the Ant Financial Cloud, with the name of DTX .

Seata Community

• Seata: Simple Extensible Autonomous Transaction Architecture. Ant Financial joins Fescar, which make it to be a more neutral and open community for distributed transaction, and Fescar be renamed to Seata.
• Apache Seata: In October 2023, Seata entered the Apache Incubator.

Maven dependency

Depending on the scenario, choose one of the two dependencies: org.apache.seata:seata-all or org.apache.seata:seata-spring-boot-starter.

<properties>
  <seata.version>2.5.0</seata.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>
<!--dependencies for non-SpringBoot application framework-->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.seata</groupId>
    <artifactId>seata-all</artifactId>
    <version>${seata.version}</version>
  </dependency>

<!--If your project base on `Spring Boot`, you can directly use the following dependencies-->
<!--Notice: `seata-spring-boot-starter` has already included `seata-all` dependency-->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.seata</groupId>
    <artifactId>seata-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>${seata.version}</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Quick Start

Quick Start

Documentation

You can view the full documentation from Apache Seata Official Website: Apache Seata Website page.

Reporting bugs

Please follow the template for reporting any issues.

Security

Please do not use our public issue tracker but refer to our security policy

Contributing

Contributors are welcomed to join the Apache Seata project. Please check CONTRIBUTING and CONTRIBUTING-CN about how to contribute to this project.

Contact

• Mailing list:
  • dev@seata.apache.org , for dev/user discussion. subscribe, unsubscribe, archive
• Online chat:

Apache Seata ecosystem

• Apache Seata Website - Apache Seata official website
• Apache Seata GoLang - Apache Seata GoLang client
• Apache Seata Samples - Samples for Apache Seata Java
• Apache Seata GoLang Samples - Samples for Apache Seata GoLang
• Apache Seata K8s - Apache Seata integration with Kubernetes
• Apache Seata CLI - CLI tool for Apache Seata operations

Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute. [Contributors].

License

Apache Seata is under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Who is using

These are only part of the companies using Apache Seata, for reference only. If you are using Apache Seata, please add your company here to tell us your scenario to make Apache Seata better.