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The design pass. Everything a module needs is a requirement: a name, a contract, and one of four kinds of provider — a module, the node's host, the mesh, the operator. Installing a module resolves every requirement or refuses, naming everything missing at once. It retires six mechanisms that grew separately: provisions through bindings, settings, assigned ports, machine facts, minted secrets and literals in the definition. ADR 0113, proposed: a provider makes what it provides, and the mesh carries it back sealed to the consumer's node. It is the return path ADR 0048 left "to a separate decision", now needed three ways: data provisions with nothing to answer with, contracts needing a value the controller cannot make, and a vault that generates nothing. Who a consumer is stays the mesh's (ADR 0049). Genesis is the one exception. On acceptance it supersedes 0048 and amends 0085. ADR 0112 is revised from three sources to that single concept. ADR 0110 is amended for two points raised in review. The vault gets the mesh-vault seat (issue 106). A seat's holder outranks co-location for a provision it delivers. Writing that down exposed an inconsistency: mesh-store delivering postgres-database would have sent every database consumer to the control-node, against to-be 23's node-local stores. So a seat delivers a provision only where the mesh has one answer for everyone — artifact store, npm registry, git, vault — and mesh-store and mesh-broker deliver nothing. 23 and 26 follow. 'Control plane' becomes 'controller' in the records written today.
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layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| to-be | designed | 2026-09-25 |
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23 — Choosing a provider
A provision is named for what the consumer's code is coupled to
(ADR 0027):
postgres-database, not database. That decides what kind of provider satisfies a requirement.
It does not decide which provider, and the mesh runs more than one of most kinds.
Why there is a choice at all
Node-specific services delivered to the mesh is the design, not an exception. Every control-capable node runs its own relational store, its own cache, its own object store; a single node may run several relational stores, each raised by the module that needed a particular engine or version. The one provision that is single today — the identity provider — already serves applications whose home is another node. So for a given provision name there are usually several providers, one per node, and they are not interchangeable: each holds different data and lives in a different place. A consumer bound to the wrong one reads the wrong database or takes a network hop it did not need.
Naming the kind is therefore only half of "how a consumer gets what it needs". The other half is which provider, and it has two shapes: consume a provider, or carry your own.
Consuming a provider
A provider is not a mesh-wide singleton. It is identified by the node it runs on together with the module that provides it — a (node, module) pair. A consumer's requirement resolves to one such provider, and which one is part of the assignment, not the manifest (ADR 0046): the same module, assigned twice, may be served by two different providers.
The default is co-location. A consumer that names no provider is served by the provider of that provision on its own node. This is the ordinary case and is meant to need nothing said — a module that wants a database wants, almost always, the database on the machine it runs on. A mesh that happens to run exactly one provider of a kind is simply the case where co-location and "the only one there is" name the same thing; that is there happens to be one, not a mesh-wide scope written into the provision.
Coupling to data is named. The exception to co-location is a consumer coupled to a particular provider's contents: two modules that must share one database, or a consumer that must reach a provider on a different node. That coupling is exactly what may not be guessed, so the assignment names the provider. Naming it is also what makes a later move safe — the mesh knows the binding is to that provider and not to whichever one is nearest.
Some provisions have one provider for the whole mesh, and a seat names it. Where a seat delivers the provision, its holder answers for it, and co-location does not apply: a second provider on the consumer's own machine does not take over for that consumer. That is not picking: the choice was made once, mesh-wide, by assigning the holder, rather than once per consumer by naming it (ADR 0110, 26 — The seats). A named provider still wins over the seat, because a consumer coupled to particular contents has said so. Only provisions the design makes one-per-mesh are delivered by a seat: the artifact store, a package registry, git and the vault. A database is not. Node-local stores, served by co-location, are the rule above.
Ambiguity is refused, never resolved by picking. If several providers of a kind exist, none is named, none is co-located, and no seat delivers it, the requirement is unsatisfiable and is refused with the candidates shown — the same stance ADR 0027 took against a confidently-wrong match, applied to the instance rather than the dialect. A wrong answer delivered quietly costs more than a refusal.
Carrying your own
A module need not consume a provider at all. It may carry its own instance of an engine inside its own composition — reachable only on the module's own network, publishing no host port, and not declared as a provision. Nothing else in the mesh can see it or bind to it, and it cannot collide with anything on a well-known port. To resolution it does not exist; it is an internal part of the module, like any other container the module runs.
This is legitimate but it is the exception, and the design says when: only when a genuine engine fork or a pinned server version makes the shared provider unusable. A module written against a customised engine, or one that needs an extension the node's provider does not carry, has no choice but to carry its own. A module that merely pins an old image of an ordinary engine does not — the version on a compose file is the server's, and the application talks to a newer shared server perfectly well once its data is migrated in. The rule is share by default; embed only when a fork or a version forces it. Most of the per-module stores that exist in the mesh being migrated onto are the first kind wearing the second's clothes, and consolidate onto the node's provider.
The distinction is worth stating because the two cases look identical from outside — a module with a database either way — and the mesh must be able to tell them apart to reason about either. A consumed provider is a binding the mesh records, rotates and can move. An embedded instance is a private detail the mesh does not manage and must not mistake for a provider.
What is not settled here
A provider that moves between nodes must keep its identity, so that a consumer's recorded choice does not silently rebind to a different provider that inherited its place. That is a property the provider lifecycle must supply, and this document names it as a requirement rather than describing its mechanism.