Building distributed systems is fundamentally different from the synchronous world many developers are used to. Using messaging as communication and eventually consistent persistence introduce several pitfalls which might be hard to foresee. Moving applications to the cloud, as a general rule, removes transactions in its traditional form and new problems

This article includes my opinionated view on a topic where there clearly is no "correct" answer. Some of the statements are influenced by others, in particular Udi Dahan and Adam Ralph. The perspective of "what a service is not" is inspired by Adam Ralph's talk Finding your service boundaries. We