Not according to Google :). They actually support and encourage distributed transactions across boundaries. Imagine all the data Google stores with your user p

Not according to Google :). They actually support and encourage distributed transactions across boundaries. Imagine all the data Google stores with your user profile across their hundreds of application boundaries. To keep things consistent you would either need to store all profile data in one massive service or support distributed transactions. The Netflix model is fault tolerance, with every service supporting various failed profile update scenarios. Google just decided to add distributed transactions support to spare all that overhead.