and there is always the Long-Running-Transactions. Where the workflow/state-machine can take days or weeks to finish. Somehow, we all still live with some hope

and there is always the Long-Running-Transactions. Where the workflow/state-machine can take days or weeks to finish. Somehow, we all still live with some hope that certain things will happen real fast so they can live in threads/processes/memory (and have no persistent backing, except maybe retry whole thing), while those that can take "longer" (how long is "longer"?) should be completely different beasts. While from business-level view, there is no much difference - but they are programmed in completely different way. For example, in some businesses, payment is like another communication. Not that sending a single message across is very simple thing, but definitely a lot less complicated than a payment process. Maybe the split, should it be internaly-language-handled - and forgotten if power goes off - or externalized and persisted, should depend on where there is certain boundary being crossed? Defining "boundary" per project..