Another good one (from someone who worked at Amazon) is Pat Helland's "Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion" which details more generally

Another good one (from someone who worked at Amazon) is Pat Helland's "Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion" which details more generally how a system might work without a global transactions. Part of which boils down to delivering idempotent messages to services. I thought it was interesting because there are a lot of parallels with how REST works but also service orientated architectures. The paper (and presentation) can be found here (which I'm sure has a few more gems on the page): http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/program.html http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/program.html