Resource

A node-specific facility such as disk space or networking sockets.

Resources need to be explicitly requested and bound, and each is tied to a specific node. Each resource will only be available to one netlet at a time, but may be divided into small chunks: a 2GB disk may be may divided into two thousand 1MB disk resources; a single IP address may be divided into several socket factories, each of which makes no more than 16 sockets available.

Most netlets need resources, but this is by no means necessary. For example, the node may well provide a message bus via one of its own facets, thus allowing netlets to communicate with each other without formally requesting resources. This is how Beatrix's manager netlets co-ordinate their workers. A node's message bus isn't the same as a network socket resource because a netlet's access to the message bus operates at a very high level.

In general resources can be anything, and might include access to data on a CD-ROM, triply-redundant disk space, load balanced IP addresses, and so on.