Eu já me perguntei é se os "four tenets of service orientation", identificados pelo Don Box, não foram uma qualquer brincadeira... conhecendo-o, não me surpreenderia.
De qualquer forma, dois apontamentos:
1º) os 4 tenets foram definidos pela Microsoft, que é a única empresa que os apresenta na forma em que estamos a falar. Veja-se a IBM/Gartner...
2º) voltando à questão da autonomia, o Vasters tem um post interesasnte de 2004 em que fala disto:
(1) Policy-negotiated behavior, (2) Explicitness of Boundaries, (3) Autonomy and (4) Contract/Schema Exchange are the proclaimed tenets of service orientation. As I am getting along with the design for the services infrastructure we're working on, I find that one of the four towers the others in importance and really doesn't really fit well with them: Autonomy.
[...]
Autonomy, on the other hand, is rather independent from the edge of a service. It describes a fundamental approach to architecture. An "autonomous digital entity" is "alive", makes independent decisions, hides its internals, and is in full control of the data it owns. An autonomous digital entity is not fully dependent on stuff happening on its edge or on inbound commands or requests. Instead, an autonomous service may routinely wake up from a self-chosen cryostasis and check whether certain data items that it is taking care of are becoming due for some actions, or it may decide that it is time to switch on the lights and lower the windows blinds to fends off burglars while its owner is on vacation.
Autonomy is actually quite difficult to (teach and) achieve and much more a matter of discipline than a matter of tooling. If you have two "Web services" that sit on top of the very same data store and frequently touch what's supposed to be each others private (data) parts, each of them may very well fulfill the P, E, CE tenets, but they are not autonomous. If you try to scale out and host such a pair or group of Web services in separate locations and on top of separate stores, you end up with a very complicated Siamese-twins-separation surgery.