You'll want to issue requests concurrently, use timeouts liberally, and implement fallbacks to cached/calculated data in the event that one of the services fail

You'll want to issue requests concurrently, use timeouts liberally, and implement fallbacks to cached/calculated data in the event that one of the services fails or misbehaves. Those are just a few guiding principles that will help when building a SOA (service-oriented architecture). Netflix has a great blog post on the structure of their platform [1]. They even open-sourced Hystrix [2], the library they use internally. [1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/02/fault-tolerance-in-high-volume.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/02/fault-tolerance-in-high-... [2] https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix