The term service has been increasingly over used in marketing brochures of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions.

In the view of information technologies, a simple description of a service could be:  a self-describing software entity, designed and developed in isolation offering near frictionless interoperability to deliver business value or input.  This covers a wide spectrum of services including web, application, hardware, virtualization, cloud and others.

Most elements of computing technology and infrastructure that

1. have the ability to interface and interact,
2. can be affiliated and managed by an external actor,
3. deliver some form of measurable business input or value

are considered a services by sense.

sense is a self federating system that hosts:  nodes, services, external interactions, business rules and others.  Each entity is being represented with sense as a service.

In order to maintain an adequate service level, a sense service extends the idea of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to declare business drivers to influence and change the behavior of a runtime scenario automatically without intervention. An SLA enables a service to declare a series of ‘states of health’ that are dispersed within the sense federation during runtime. The switch between the service level states is computed depending upon pre-defined criteria - average response time of the service, how much revenue is acquired by the service, etc.  sense evaluates the health, can overload the service and intelligently redirect the call to the best capable service provider within the federation.

As a last level fall back, if all services within the federation are failing, sense is able to intercept all the calls and propagate a mock response from the mock strategy configured for each service.  This protects the calling system from a possible system crash and enables the overall system to catch its breath.  The system continues operation while some of the services are still in an unavailable or crisis state.  The mock strategy disrupts a potential domino effect that would occur in many applications when one component of the system fails.