When we persist shard names to disk in config metadata, and the shard changes it's name, the persisted records will now point to unknown shards. One idea that came out of the help ticket post-mortem was to introduce a level of indirection such that persisted records will "point to" a logical record for the shard (similar to a foreign key in a relational system). This ticket is to investigate if this would be helpful for existing code and future code; and also determine the level of effort if it is.