Distributed transactions rarely fail in dramatic ways. They fail in boring ways.

A client writes key account:alice, the response gets lost, the client retries, another request starts commit, and now the system has to answer a simple question: did that write count?

That is the kind of question Kahuna should answer on the server, not push onto every client library and application.

The next step for Kahuna transactions is a reusable transaction coordinator: one server-owned place that tracks what a transaction has read, written, locked, retried, committed, or rolled back.

About eight years ago, I had the opportunity to build systems for my company using Erlang. Discovering the actor model was a turning point in how I designed systems from that moment on. However, for strategic reasons, we had to move away from Erlang and focus on the .NET ecosystem. While robust and well-established actor model libraries for C# exist, they included many features we didn’t need, and their performance wasn’t entirely satisfactory for our use cases. This led me to the idea of building a lightweight library.