This paper is an analytic-theory contribution in the sense of Gregor's (2006) theory for analyzing (Type I): it identifies a fragmentation that the canonical distributed-systems literature has documented across four separate operational disciplines without recognising them as instances of a single structural condition, derives the property under which the fragmentation dissolves, and presents an instantiation as an existence proof that the alternative is realisable in production — not the design-science evaluation of an artefact (Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004), which a comparative systems study would undertake separately. For decades, deployment without downtime, cross-datacenter replication, backup, and offline operation have evolved as four parallel bodies of practice, each with its own vocabulary, apparatus, and cost model. This paper shows that this separation is contingent rather than structural. Under the substrate condition established in prior papers of this series — where the journal is code-as-data, dense, and composed of compact named operations rather than serialised states — the four disciplines reduce to a single primitive: Deployment becomes replay against the substrate up to the present head. Replication is the same replay at another site. Backup is the corpus held without replay. Offline operation is replay after a delay. The canonical apparatuses developed for these disciplines — blue-green environments, change-data-capture pipelines, snapshot agents, and message-queue buffers — perform work that the substrate already provides by construction. Each arose independently to compensate for the absence of the substrate condition rather than to extend it. The construct introduced here names the substrate, formalises the four equivalences that follow from it, and characterises the operational regimes in which these equivalences can be observed.
Álvaro Antonio Rivera (Mon,) studied this question.