Azure Best Practice #3: What's Good for SOA is Good for the Cloud : Azure Feeds

Azure Best Practice #3: What's Good for SOA is Good for the Cloud

Azure best practice #3 is to apply SOA principles to your cloud applications. The core ideas of SOA apply equally strongly to the cloud:

Software components are loosely coupled.
Message-based programs do a lot of the work.
Boundaries of communication/reliability/security/transactions are a key consideration in solution architecture.
Use of standard protocols and message formats provides broad interoperability.
Stateless service development is encouraged which facilitates easy load balancing.
Communication is presumed to be expensive.
Coarse-grained interfaces are preferred over chatty interfaces.

This isn't a recommendation to use SOAP, however. See Best Practice #4 for a discussion of SOAP vs. REST.