Principles

To achieve a state of true interchangeability and universal trust, the OMI has codified eleven foundational principles. These principles serve as the rigorous technical mandate required to maintain the semantic integrity and operational autonomy of the distributed backend.

The OMI specification is divided into two distinct tiers: Core Principles and Extended Best Practices. The Core Principles (1–8) are mandatory requirements for any service seeking OMI certification. They define the essential contracts of isolation, idempotency, and standardized communication. The Extended Principles (9–11) represent the operational benchmarks for observability and resilience, ensuring that while a service is architecturally compliant, it is also industrially robust.

Adherence to this canon ensures that a microservice is no longer a proprietary black box, but a standardized primitive—capable of being discovered, utilized, and replaced across any OMI-compliant environment without architectural friction.