Servicescharacteristic

Servicescharacteristic is a general concept used in software engineering to denote any attribute that defines a service’s nature, behavior, or quality. The term is not a formal standard, but appears in architecture guides, catalogs, and governance documents as a shorthand for describing what a service offers and how it performs.

Functional characteristics describe the service's capabilities: the operations it exposes, the data it accepts and returns, input validation, and business rules governing its use. Non-functional characteristics describe how the service behaves, such as performance, availability, reliability, scalability, security, privacy, compliance with regulations, maintainability, portability, and interoperability with other systems.

Documentation and discovery: Services characteristics are typically captured in service descriptions, catalogs, contracts, or interface definitions. Formats may include API specifications (e.g., OpenAPI), interface contracts, or metadata repositories. These descriptions enable automated discovery, composition, and validation against requirements.

Applications: Defining services characteristics supports service-level agreements, governance, versioning, and compatibility checks when composing services into larger systems. It also facilitates benchmarking and monitoring by tying metrics to specified attributes.

Examples: In web services, a REST API's endpoint set, data formats, and latency targets are part of its characteristics. In cloud services, availability zones, scaling policies, and security controls are chartered characteristics of the service.

See also: service-oriented architecture, API, service-level agreement, quality of service, metadata, description language.