Runtime service families

Documentation status: architecture — see Maturity and evidence.

Runtime configurations may expose families named Agent, Queue, Journal, Operation, Rules, SimpleTimer, or calendarTimer. These names identify service families; they do not by themselves guarantee every property associated with the textbook pattern.

Before documenting one as reference, verify its concrete runtime contract:

Family	Intended role	Contract to verify
Agent	delegated/autonomous execution	triggers, permissions, state, retry, action boundary
Queue	buffered asynchronous work	delivery, ordering, persistence, retry, dead-letter behavior
Journal	durable trace/event record	retention, ordering, replay, transaction boundary
Operation	named executable operation	inputs, target, result, failure semantics
Rules	evaluation/dispatch	context, ordering, conflicts, side effects
SimpleTimer	interval trigger	interval, startup, overlap, failure behavior
calendarTimer	calendar trigger	timezone, missed runs, recurrence, concurrency

To add a new service family, define its metadata contract, register an implementation, expose configuration and lifecycle hooks, declare an instance, then test startup, shutdown, error behavior, events, and persistence before publishing guarantees.