What is eventual consistency and how do sagas help in distributed systems?

**Eventual consistency** means replicas/services converge to the same value over time, but reads may be stale temporarily. **Sagas** manage multi-step workflows across services without a global transaction: - Break a business transaction into steps. - Each step has a compensating action to undo work if later steps fail. This improves availability and scalability, at the cost of more complex failure handling.