1. A method for service manipulation in a distributed computing environment, the method comprising: specifying at a first computing device a dependency relationship between a first service and a second service implementing at least portions of the distributed computing environment, at least one of the first service and the second service operating on a second computing device different from the first computing device, the specified dependency relationship maintained in a hierarchical tree structure comprising a set of nodes, each node representative of one or more services, the set of nodes interconnected to represent a set of dependency relationships; and conditioning invocation of a specified operation to manipulate an operational state of the first service, the invocation of the specified operation being conditioned on the specified dependency relationship between the first service and the second service.