Microservices Finally Stop Ghosting: Go + RabbitMQ Outbox Pattern Ensures Events Don't Ditch the DB Mid-Transaction

A recent article discussed the implementation of the transactional outbox pattern in microservices using Go, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Docker Compose. The pattern addresses the issue of inconsistent event publishing in distributed systems by storing domain events in a database table within the same transaction as the business operation. A separate background worker then publishes these events to a message broker asynchronously, ensuring consistency between state changes and event delivery. The article presented a minimal but production-oriented implementation of this pattern, including a poll-based worker that queries the database every 1-2 seconds. The system consists of two microservices: the Order Service, which exposes an endpoint to create orders and writes outbox events atomically, and the Notification Service, which consumes events and demonstrates exactly-once processing using consumer-side idempotency. The implementation includes essential metrics for service level objectives and trace context propagation across services.