What is a service?

The service is a basic compositional unit. This may sound too abstract, but it just means that you can use the services in AIR scripts. This means you can call functions in different services one after another or in parallel, collect results, and use the results from one service as arguments to another one.

As an example, consider a service that can store data – database – and a service that can process that data, such as searching that data. You query the database service, get the result, and pass it to the search service for searching this database data. These services can be run by different developers and hosts, or by you.

Basically, any service in Fluence is a set of .wasm modules linked together and called from AIR scripts. The services can store information about their state, access the file system, run external programs, and so on. The services must be created before use; their creation happens as described in a service "recipe" called blueprint.

The services are run by the Fluence Compute Engine. (WebAssembly runtime).