OperationKind vs OperationType: identity versus routing

The pipeline has two orthogonal axes for talking about an operation, and they are easy to confuse because their names look almost alike. They answer different questions, live in different repositories, and — crucially — do not share value strings.

• OperationKind — identity. What kind of work is this?

• OperationType — routing. Which worker queue should run it?

This page is the canonical reference for the distinction. When in doubt, decide whether you are asking about an operation’s identity or its routing, then use the matching axis and the mapping table below — not the words.

OperationKind — the identity axis

Home	ccat_ops_db.models (ops-db)
Role	Identity of a unit of work; the polymorphic discriminator of the uniform Operation model
Drives	recovery, the circuit breaker, Redis task-state, and the Failure-event key

OperationKind is the single source of truth for what an operation is. Its values are byte-identical to the frozen breadcrumb strings already stored in the failure history, so identity is the same name everywhere — recovery, the circuit breaker, the operation-row discriminator, and the failure-event key all reference the enum member, never a free-text literal.

It has six members. Note the deliberate name/value asymmetry on two of them (PACKAGING and ARCHIVE): the names follow the stage, the values follow the frozen breadcrumb strings.

Member	Value	Stage
PACKAGING	raw_data_package	Package raw files at the source
BUNDLING	data_transfer_package	Bundle packages for transfer
TRANSFER	transfer	Move bytes between sites
UNPACK	unpack	Unpack a transferred package
ARCHIVE	long_term_archive	Write to long-term storage
STAGING	staging	Stage a package for processing

For the model itself, see the ops-db operation model reference and Uniform pipeline operation model.

OperationType — the routing axis

Home	ccat_data_transfer.operation_types (data-transfer)
Role	Routing: selects the worker queue for a task; drives worker queue discovery
Drives	QUEUE_OPERATIONS_BY_LOCATION_TYPE → location-specific queue names; worker self-discovery at startup

OperationType is the routing contract. Queue names are built from its values and workers self-discover their queues at startup, so this axis answers where the work runs, not what it is. It is a separate, frozen contract from identity.

It has eight members:

Member	Value
RAW_DATA_PACKAGE_CREATION	raw_data_package_creation
DELETION	deletion
DATA_TRANSFER_PACKAGE_CREATION	data_transfer_package_creation
DATA_TRANSFER_UNPACKING	data_transfer_unpacking
DATA_TRANSFER	data_transfer
STAGING	staging
LONG_TERM_ARCHIVE_TRANSFER	long_term_archive_transfer
MONITORING	monitoring

Two of these routing types — DELETION and MONITORING — are not OperationKinds. They name work that has no operation-identity row:

• deletion is not a unit of work with a Status. Deletion is a PhysicalCopyStatus state machine on the artifact (PRESENT → DELETION_* → DELETED), running in the destroy direction. Folding it into the Operation model would fabricate an op row for an artifact transition — see Uniform pipeline operation model (decision 6).

• monitoring is routing-only: it names the per-location monitoring queue, not a pipeline operation that produces or consumes a PhysicalCopy.

The mapping table

The two axes are orthogonal: a given stage’s identity value and its routing value are different strings, even when they describe the same step. This is the table to rely on.

Stage	Identity — OperationKind value	Routing — OperationType value
Packaging	raw_data_package	raw_data_package_creation
Bundling	data_transfer_package	data_transfer_package_creation
Transfer	transfer	data_transfer
Unpack	unpack	data_transfer_unpacking
Archive	long_term_archive	long_term_archive_transfer
Staging	staging	staging
Deletion	(no kind — artifact state machine)	deletion
Monitoring	(no kind — routing only)	monitoring

Read across any row and the two value columns differ (the lone exception is staging, where both happen to read staging). The bottom two rows have a routing value but no identity — they are not operations.

One honest caveat

The two axis names (OperationKind / OperationType) and several of their values are near-synonyms, so rely on the identity-versus-routing distinction and the mapping table above, not on the words.

See also

Core Concepts — Sites, DataLocations, Operations, Managers, Queues, Routes Routing & Queue Discovery — how work is routed to location-specific queues Uniform pipeline operation model — the uniform operation model and the identity/routing split (decision 6 on deletion)