Services Control Their Identifiers

Learn about catalogs and proxy policies.

Catalogs

Suppose you work for an online retailer and you need to build a “catalog” service. We’ll see in Embrace Plurality that one catalog will never be enough. A catalog service should really handle many catalogs. Given that, how should we identify which catalog goes with which user?

The first, most obvious approach is to assign an owner to each catalog, as shown in the following figure. When a user wants to access a particular catalog, the owner ID is included in the request.

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