Any hosted service can be a factory — an identity provider grants clients, an
analytics service grants a tracking identity, a mail server grants mailboxes, an
application platform grants a project that is several of those at once.
Providing is a FACET a module may have, not a kind of module it is, which is the
same conclusion this effort reached about services and applications arriving
from the other direction. So `provider` stops being a category too.
Two relational stores from different vendors both grant "a database" and are the
sharpest possible test of the substitutability rule. They fail it completely —
different protocol, dialect, driver, client library compiled into the consumer —
so `database` stays a tag, now with two real providers rather than a thought
experiment.
The assignment is a third entity, recorded because the operator tried the
alternative: modules were once node-agnostic and it did not survive. Several of
a provider's properties belong to neither end — where its state lives, how it is
reached, tuning derived from the machine's hardware, which instance serves a
given consumer. Not the catalogue, because they differ per node; not the node,
because they are about this module. A design with only modules and nodes has
nowhere to put them, which is what node-agnostic ran out of. The current system
already stores environment values per module AND per node, arriving the same
way.
Which answers the question asked directly: two nodes both run a store, so which
serves a consumer? Neither obvious answer. Not the consumer naming a node — that
is placement in the consumer's manifest, a game edited because a database moved.
Not the consumer not caring — for presence it genuinely does not, for
instantiation it cares permanently.
What the consumer knows is the SCOPE of its own need: one instance shared across
every instance of itself, or one each. That decides, and needs no node named.
Then the mesh binds, and the binding is recorded on the assignment and is
sticky — a resolver that re-derives which store serves a consumer will one day
derive a different answer and relocate a database.
jschoubben
a3c7e7e1f1