• The services are easy to replace
• Not dependent on programming language
• Best / finest granularity
• Each service is elastic, resilient, composable, minimal, and complete
• Continuous delivery software
• Do one thing well (The services are small - fine-grained to perform a single function)
• Decentralized
• Independent
• Low / stable latency

The functionality of the service may not be so simple that the output of the service always needs to be combined with another service's functionality.

• Auto service discovery
• Monitoring
• Loadbalancing of course

• Containers (LXC, OpenVZ or Docker)
• Image is the version
• Test and deploy same artifact (image)
• Stateless servers decrease change risk

• Geo Located
• Resource Pool
• Grouping Related Instances with Containers
• Start empty, dynamically scalable