It was originally written in Java and lots of its Go code is a strange mix of the two (Java-like idioms in Go). This might be where the term "Gova" came from.
While Amazon offers a business associate agreement ("BAA"), our legal review found it to be unacceptable -- the BAA we were privately provided last year significantly deviates from the standard language recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [1].
Notably, Rackspace's BAA is public [2] (I'm not associated with Rackspace) and reasonably supports the standard language (I am not a lawyer).
In particular, Amazon's agreement included: A clause that puts all of the burden for securing data on the CE. No terms outlining how the BA would respond to breaches of unsecured PHI. Lack of specification about the BA’s level of access to PHI. A non-disclosure clause.
There are a lot of simple techniques that can be used to optimize services in a SOA (e.g. caching).
Since each service follows a request/response format, it becomes easier to see where the majority of a request lifespan spends its time to help eliminate bottle necks. You'd be surprised how low the overall latency for a request can be in large companies like Amazon (< 100ms)