"service resource" is not required to advertise its characteristics

The CAMP spec says that a Plan can contain a ServiceSpec that "describes a service used by the application". A ServiceSpec can contain an array of CharacteristicSpecifcations which "describe a desired characteristic or capability". Example 3 shows:

10 characteristics:
11 -
12 characteristic_type: com.example:Linux
13 com.example.linux.kernelVersion: [3.9.6]
14 org.iaas.bitsize: 64

This seems clear enough, but what is lacking is any way to correlate this information with the information provided by the CAMP resource model.

The purpose of ServiceSpecification's is to provide information to the platform so that it can select "service resources" that meet the consumers requirements. The CAMP TC has long been of the opinion that the process of matching the information in a Plan to specific "service resources" instances is, and should be, opaque to the consumer; the CAMP spec shouldn't say anything about this process. However, there is a difference between "opaque" and "a complete and utter mystery".

At a minimum the CAMP spec should define some optional way whereby a Provider can adorn a "service resource" (or a resource that inherits from the "service resource") with enough information to give Consumers some notion of whether or not the service represented by that resource will be able to meet their requirements. Ideally this information should be analogous to the information in the CharacteristicSpecification array.