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A principal role of the SD&B component is to support an architecture that recognizes that services come and go, sometimes unexpectedly. To that end, it should be possible to decouple the lifecycle of a particular service instance from the lifecycle (i.e. deployment) of the API-X framework, including the SD&B component. Furthermore, it should be possible to deploy this component in a distribute distributed fashion across multiple machines, both to support high availability and high levels of concurrency. It should also be possible for services to be deployed on an arbitrary number of external hosts using any language or framework. With that structure, network partitions and service failure should not affect the overall operation of this component nor the overall operation of API-X.
In many ways, the SD&B component can be thought of as a management interface, distinct from individual service endpoints. While its role is not that of operating on specific repository resources, it can be viewed as a broker between clients, repository resources and external services.
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