Here's an excerpt from a discussion on ACM Queue[1] between Jim Gray and Werner Vogels on this: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded

Here's an excerpt from a discussion on ACM Queue[1] between Jim Gray and Werner Vogels on this: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there's no data sharing among the services. [1] - http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388 http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...