On my phone so boo cite. Look up Amazon apologetic computing. They also have a presentation describing their general distributed approach. The main thing is tha

On my phone so boo cite. Look up Amazon apologetic computing. They also have a presentation describing their general distributed approach. The main thing is that you have a bunch of components that you expect to fail. If they don't get confirmation, they send another message to the next component. Then, there's a stateless, unambiguous way to determine which message "wins" in case of conflict. For instance, an order submits two shipping requests for the same order. They use, for instance, the highest message ID (a GUID) to avoid duplicate processing. It's all very neat, though I'm doing a bad job explaining. Search for Amazon architectural presentations and hopefully you can find it. It may have been on James Hamilton's blog, maybe.