Designing a Saga for Order Placement

Design a saga for: reserve inventory → charge payment → confirm order, across three services (Inventory, Payment, Order), each with its own database. The payment step can fail (card declined) and, rarely, the confirm-order step can fail after payment succeeds (a bug in the Order service).

1. Choose choreography or orchestration and justify.
2. Write out the forward steps and the compensations for each failure point.
3. What isolation anomaly could a customer observe mid-saga, and how would you mitigate it?
4. How do you guarantee the compensations themselves are not lost if the orchestrator crashes mid-flow?