Dude, where's my service?
The first of Little Bo Peep's challenges that we're going to address is simply to determine the location of her sheep, or in this case, her service. In our analogy, Little Bo Peep has installed GPS trackers in each of her sheep. However, the GPS at its core only provides the longitude and latitude of a given point. It alone doesn't give you any information about that point, only that it exists. If she stops at simply installing the trackers, she hasn't really solved the problem, has she? At a very high level, she can see that a GPS tracker exists in a particular location. However, what she doesn't yet know is which sheep exists at that location. She also needs some sort of receiver to maintain the location of all of those GPS coordinates. This comes down to service definition and centralized service registration.
Every service in every network has some sort of definition. Some aspects of the definition could be very high level...