Concepts: Discovery
Every worker sees every function in the system — and gets notified when functions appear or disappear as workers connect and disconnect.
When a worker connects to the engine, it receives the full list of functions registered across every other worker. When a new worker connects and registers functions, every existing worker gets notified. When a worker disconnects, its functions disappear and everyone is notified again. Functions can also unregister themselves.
The engine maintains a live registry and pushes changes to every connected worker in real time.
Architecture
Why This Matters
In traditional distributed systems, services need to know where other services live. This knowledge typically comes from one of several places:
- Configuration files — hardcoded URLs or hostnames that must be updated and redeployed whenever services move
- DNS-based discovery — services register with DNS and others look them up, but DNS caching creates propagation delays
- Service registries — dedicated infrastructure (Consul, etcd, ZooKeeper) that services connect to separately from their actual communication path
- Service meshes — infrastructure that operates at the network layer, intercepting traffic between services without knowledge of the application semantics
Each approach trades off complexity, latency, and operational burden. Most require explicit registration, health checking, and some form of polling or TTL-based invalidation.
iii takes a different approach: the engine itself is the registry, and it pushes changes to workers rather than waiting for them to poll.
What This Enables
Traditional architectures require coordination when the system topology changes. Adding a new service means updating every service that needs to call it — changing config files, updating client libraries, or waiting for DNS to propagate.
With a central registry topology changes are automatic:
- Workers scale independently — Scale horizontally and vertically only where you need it
- New functionality is immediately available — Connect a new worker with new functions and they're immediately available to the entire system
- Workers remove services cleanly — Disconnect a worker and its functions disappear from the registry, no stale references