You can group SharePoint 2010 services using the SharePoint 2010 object model and a high level point of view. The Application Discovery and Load Balancer, the Claims to Windows Token and the Business Data Connectivity service can be grouped into IIS Web Services.
IIS Web Services are Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services which are part of service applications. WCF is used for communication between clients and services. So IIS Web Services have a corresponding Service Application where you e.g. can manage the service.
So at the end a service application itself is ‘just’ a service that implements the Service Application Framework.
Relevant posts
Resources
What is it?
Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service
This service is necessary for e.g. adding servers to the farm or for the management or creation / grouping / configuration of service applications.
The load balancer allocates requests to service applications.
Claims to Windows Token Service
“The Claims to Windows Token Service (c2WTS) is a feature of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). The c2WTS extracts user principal name (UPN) claims from non-Windows security tokens, such as SAML and X.509 tokens, and generates impersonation-level Windows security tokens.” (see Claims to Windows Token Service (c2WTS))
Business Data Connectivity Service
Here is a quote of a short but exact description:
“The Business Data Connectivity Service Application now allows for read and write connectivity to external data sources. The Business Data Connectivity service builds upon both the Security Token and Secure Store services to assist in the connection of external data. It also provides inputs to the PerformancePoint, Search, and Visio Graphics Service Applications.” (see Planning for the New Service Application Architecture in SP2010 )
Availability
The three services and service applications are included in all of the SharePoint 2010 products.
Configuration
Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service
This service and service application comes preconfigured and deployed.
Claims to Windows Token Service
This service and service application comes preconfigured and deployed.
As you can see in the picture service applications can be found under the SharePoint Web Services node in IIS manager.
Business Data Connectivity Service
This service application needs a database server and an application pool account.
Summary
Ok now it just gets complicated (at least for me) since I didn’t want to go deep into services. The services architecture is really huge and all the things looking easy in the browser have a lot of other things behind them.