The document discusses best practices for developing and using web services. It addresses key questions about when web services are ready for production, where they should be used, and how to design them for security, performance and interoperability. The document provides references to additional resources on web services architecture, performance best practices, versioning and the relationship between web services and service-oriented architecture. It also outlines challenges in distributed systems that web services can help address and describes appropriate and inappropriate uses of web services in applications.