Nowadays, proprietary and monolithic IT environments are more and more transformed into standardand component-based service infrastructures. In this keynote, we will analyse this trend especially for the area of e-Science. While in the past decades, scientist have developed centralised, application-focused (silo-oriented) hardware and software environments, they now (for good reasons) tend to join forces in building and operating general-purpose, networked, distributed compute and data grids, recently called e-Infrastructures. This trend is enabled by grand technology progress towards reusable, decomposable, service-oriented software architectures and standard off-the-shelf hardware, among others.