This paper¹ describes a holistic approach towards the deployment and runtime management of services on active network nodes taken by the FAIN project. Both the underlying service model and the architectures supporting deployment and management are component oriented. The separation of service meta-information and implementation code allows for a very flexible way of service deployment management as it facilitates selective code distribution, finegrained installation and instantiation. Active services are composed from a set of service components that can be selected on demand at deployment time and installed in any combination of the data, control, and management planes which enables realisation of arbitrary active services.