The role of the service layer is to provide the pane-of-glass and custom services needed for the mission. This includes providing connectors to other services, hosting data analytics packages, providing a user interface if needed, and provide core services.

The connectors in the application layer connect the services to the support layer. The protocol abstraction layer provides the pathway for a connector to talk directly to a sensor. Each service should be thought of as a micro-service in a container. The OpenFog Consortium advocates container deployment as the proper method for software to be deployed at the edge. This makes sense when we think of the edge devices as extensions of the cloud. An example of a container deployment could look like the following diagram. Each cylinder represents an individual container that can be deployed and managed separately. Each service then exposes APIs to reach between containers and layers: