What architectural best practice aims to reduce the interdependencies between services?

Loose coupling is an architectural best practice that focuses on minimizing the dependencies between services in a system. This approach allows individual services to operate independently, which enhances flexibility and facilitates maintenance and scalability. When services are loosely coupled, changes to one service are less likely to impact others, enabling teams to develop, deploy, and scale services autonomously.

This practice is particularly important in cloud-based architectures, where services often need to be updated or replaced without causing downtime or instability in the overall system. Loose coupling promotes a more resilient architecture, as it allows for better load distribution and the independent upgrading of services.

Other architectural practices, such as service-oriented architecture, high availability, and stateful design, have their own focuses and advantages but do not specifically address the reduction of interdependencies in the same way. Service-oriented architecture describes a design paradigm that could incorporate loose coupling, but it doesn't inherently solve dependency issues on its own. High availability focuses on ensuring continuous service operation and minimizing downtime, while stateful design pertains to how services manage their state, rather than how they interact with each other. Thus, loose coupling is the best answer for reducing interdependencies among services.