Zero configuration, self organization and semantic addressing. Perfect secrecy against passive and active attacks. Beautiful, simple and language agnostic API. With the pervasion of cloud computing, the barrier of entry to large-scale distributed projects has been lowered significantly, even small teams gaining access to remarkable amounts of computing power. This phenomenon raised the importance of distributed messaging models for hiding the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, not just for end users, but for system designers as well. A few major, state of the art messaging architectures are currently in use, among them, the historically popular centralized model and the challenger socket queuing model. The former solves most messaging requirements, but by its very nature, is hard to scale; while the latter does scale, but also reintroduces the complexity of network management which the centralized model originally set out to remove. The key challenge is that the goals of simplicity, decentralization and security conflict each other in a general distributed computing case. The goal of Iris is not to compete with other generic messaging systems, but to provide a solution for a specific problem set - decentralizing backend services in cloud architectures - for which it achieves a fine balance between the desired goals.