Yes I suppose you could call it a distributed commit of a distributed transaction (hence formalised distributed transactions being one solution). And yes, the d

Yes I suppose you could call it a distributed commit of a distributed transaction (hence formalised distributed transactions being one solution). And yes, the design you describe is what I have followed in my applications. What I find odd is that I don't see this pattern being talked about, despite the importance in certain domains... if one goes through a couple of articles on highscalability, it never seems to be discussed. Queues are treated as reliable golden sources. Perhaps it's because a lot of the high volume stuff that's discussed out in the open doesn't need to be 100% reliable (e.g. missing a few Facebook Like click events -- which can be reconciled later anyway) or has a natural replay source (e.g. processing application logs). Software dealing with more business critical scenarios (e.g. financial applications) aren't generally discussed out in the open in detail.