When I first read about this maxim of Services/SOA/WebServices/whatever, I thought this made a lot of sense. And I Still do. However, one question comes to mind: How many people out there are building really autonomous services?
One pattern I'm seeing here is that we seem to rarely create stand-alone services. Instead, those services are part of a much larger infrastructure, which typically might be a larger application (that might include, for example, business-side configuration and parametrization), and possibly a set of services, and not just a single one. How common is this for others?
The reason I bring this point up is that, if you were to be really strict and make each and every single service as autonomous as it would be theoretically good, it would require probably too much work.... far more than you'd be willing to spend, for example, in an escenario such as the outlined above, in which case you'd probably make the whole application (aka. the set of services) autonomous as a whole entity, but certainly not each one on its own.
