Service entities, as the name implies, are abstractions of each of your own upstream services. Examples of Services would be a data transformation microservice, a billing API, etc. The main attribute of a Service is its URL (where Kong should proxy traffic to), which can be set as a single string or by specifying its protocol, host, port and path individually. Services are associated to routes (a Service can have many routes associated with it). Routes are entry-points in Kong and define rules to match client requests. Once a route is matched, Kong proxies the request to its associated Service. See the [Proxy Reference][proxy-reference] for a detailed explanation of how Kong proxies traffic.