⭐ Saga Flow

How a single order actually moves through all five saga-participating services — happy path, the transactional outbox pattern, the Kafka topic map, and compensation — is on the saga-flow.html diagram, merged with the services-reference.html diagram and Architecture Overview, which described this same system from two other angles, rather than repeated here.

Worth calling out on its own: this is choreography, not orchestration. order-service originates the saga and owns the order's final lifecycle state, but nothing it does commands payment-service or restaurant-service — each reacts to Kafka events independently. Compensation is the clearest proof of that: payment-service's refund and order-service's cancellation are two separate consumer groups on the same restaurant-rejected-topic, neither aware the other exists.