Compensation (draft)

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Some random thoughts on what I've learned about compensation as an alternative to transactions.

Compensation means to rollback the effect of a transaction (in the broadest sense of the term) with another transaction that has the opposite effects
When thinking about compensation, I've always stopped at "What do I do if the compensation action fails?" -- it seemed to me a big problem I cannot handle (how can I do something that does not fail?)
from these articles from The Register I gain a fundamental insight: if the compensation operation fails, the only alternative is to let it handle to a human operator

This can handle extended outages of a service (think of one of AWS or Azure)
Under the hypothesis that if a system is unavailable the others are available (not always true, see these episodes from Azure)

In my opinion, it is also fine to retry the compensation operation for some time and at last give up and ask for human intervention

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