Elasticity
Discussion
Elasticity describes the ability of the market or deployment to add, remove, activate, deactivate, or substitute Qualified Nodes as workload, policy, or operational conditions change. In the Governed Node Service Market, Elasticity supports workload adaptation, resilience, provider substitution, jurisdictional routing, operational continuity, and service-level management.
Elasticity matters because governed work may increase, decrease, shift across jurisdictions, or require substitution when a Node becomes unavailable, degraded, suspended, or ineligible. Elasticity allows the market to adapt to those conditions without assigning governed work to unqualified Nodes or weakening evidence obligations.
Definition
ability of the market or deployment to add, remove, activate, deactivate, or substitute Qualified Nodes as workload, policy, or operational conditions change
Source
Financial Systems Archetype, Part 7: Governed Node Service Market
Note
Elasticity supports adaptation to changing workload, policy, and operational conditions. Elasticity does not allow unqualified Nodes to receive governed work. Added, activated, or substituted Nodes must satisfy the applicable qualification, policy, residency, sovereignty, security, evidence, service-level, and non-functional criteria.
Elasticity differs from Scalability. Elasticity concerns adaptation to changing conditions by activating, deactivating, adding, removing, or substituting Qualified Nodes. Scalability concerns the ability of the market or deployment to support growth in participants, Nodes, governed functions, work events, evidence references, compensation claims, jurisdictions, and settlement instructions.
Example
A jurisdictional reporting workload increases at quarter-end. The market assigns work to additional eligible Qualified Nodes that satisfy the same governed function, policy constraints, service-level expectations, and evidence obligations.