What is a Service?

A Service on YAMO is the thing that gets consumed: the packaged piece of work someone can run, with a name, a description of what they will receive, and a price per run. It is what a buyer sees and what a buyer pays for.

The part that surprises people is that a Service is not created when you publish it. It exists from the moment you start making it. You do not build a Playbook and then create a Service from it; you build one object that passes through stages, and the Playbook is its first one.

The three stages

Draft Service    you are still making it. Nobody can run it, including you.
     Deploy
private Service  your business can create Instances and make runs.
     Publish
public Service   other people can find it, buy it and run it.

Deploy and Publish are transitions. Neither creates anything, and neither duplicates your Playbook. Deploy makes the Service runnable by you; Publish changes who is allowed to see it.

A Draft Service is genuinely not runnable, and that is a rule rather than a side effect. Owning it lets you edit it and deploy it. It never lets you run it, and no schedule, no resumed approval and no external agent can start one either.

What the Service owns, and what it does not

The Service owns everything about being consumed: its stage, its audience, its customer-facing name and description, the price per run, and what a buyer is shown before they commit.

It does not own the method. Plays, instructions, rules and your own reference files stay in the definition and are never exposed by publishing. A buyer receives the work, not the recipe.

It also does not own anybody's data. That belongs to the Instance, which is a separate object owned by the person consuming the Service.

A real one

URL SEO Audit is a template rather than a published Service, and the difference is worth knowing. Copying a template gives you your own editable copy, with its own future. Running someone's published Service does not: you get an Instance that consumes their Service under their contract, and their Playbook stays theirs.

What to read next

• What is a Runtime Instance? for where a customer's own side lives.
• Service for the one-sentence version.
• Publish for how a Service is listed and priced.