Specification

Dispatcher routing — Northwind Ingestion

Status: Proposed · Keywords: RFC 2119 · Owner: Platform

The key words MUST, SHOULD, and MAY in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Scope

This specifies the dispatcher introduced by RFC 014: how an accepted POST /events payload is assigned to ingest-a or ingest-b. It does not specify the gateway API, warehouse schema, or batch path.

Definitions

• Event ID — the id field on an accepted event. Opaque string.
• Partition — hash(event id) mod 2. Even → ingest-a. Odd → ingest-b.

Requirements

• REQ-001 The dispatcher MUST assign every accepted event to exactly one of ingest-a or ingest-b.
• REQ-002 The assignment MUST be a function of event ID alone.
• REQ-003 If the chosen queue is unavailable, the dispatcher MUST shed the event and emit an alert. It MUST NOT block the gateway request for more than 200ms. (Unresolved vs blocking: Reliability, 2026-08-25.)
• REQ-004 The dispatcher MUST NOT inspect or persist payload bodies.

Examples

Event id=evt_01 hashes even → ingest-a. Event id=evt_02 hashes odd → ingest-b. A 503 from ingest-a yields HTTP 202 from the gateway, a shed count, and no warehouse write.

Compliance

Conformance is a unit test of REQ-001–REQ-002 on a fixed ID list, plus a chaos test that ingest-a down does not stall /events past 200ms.