Service Catalogue Entry
The record that makes a service a first-class object in the platform — owner, dependencies, docs, runbooks and health in one place with a single identity.
A developer platform needs a noun to hang everything on. The catalogue entry is it: a declared record, usually a file in the service's own repository, naming the service, its owner, its lifecycle stage, its dependencies, its API definitions and its links to dashboards and runbooks.
Once the entry exists, capabilities compose around it. Ownership queries become answerable, which turns "who owns this?" from a Slack archaeology exercise into a lookup. Scorecards can assess every service against standards. Dependency queries answer impact questions. Access provisioning can be derived from ownership rather than requested.
The reason it must live in the service's repository rather than in a central registry is decay. A separate registry is updated when someone remembers; a file next to the code is updated in the same pull request that changes the thing it describes, and it can be validated in CI. Catalogues fail almost exclusively because their contents went stale, and location is the main determinant of whether that happens.