Strategies are described for organizing the runtime components of an application into an entity domain framework. The entity domain framework includes one or more entity domains arranged in a hierarchical fashion. Each entity domain further groups one or more components together in a hierarchical fashion. Each entity domain can include one or more services that provide a policy to the components within the entity domain. Composite functionality couples the framework together, and further provides a bus-like mechanism whereby an entity can forward service requests up through the hierarchy until a domain is found that satisfies the requests. Exemplary services provided by the entity domain framework include lifetime management services, error handling services, and so forth. The hierarchical structure provides an efficient way of exposing functionality to groups of components that will share this functionality in a common context, without requiring costly and complex atomistic coupling of services to components or duplication of service instances.