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.