A Crash Course on Cell-based Architecture

No one wants to sail in a ship that can sink because of a single hull breach.

This led to the development of bulkheads, which are vertical partition walls that divide a ship’s interior into watertight compartments.

Cell-based architecture attempts to follow the same concept in software development.

In cell-based architecture, there are multiple isolated instances of a workload, where each instance is known as a cell. There are three properties of a cell:

• Each cell is independent.

• A cell does not share the state with other cells.

• Each cell handles a subset of the overall traffic.

For example, imagine a web application that handles user requests. In a cell-based architecture, multiple cells of the same web application would be deployed, each serving a subset of the user requests. These cells are copies of the same application working together to distribute the workload.

This approach reduces the blast radius of impact. If a workload uses 5 cells to service 50 requests, a failure in only one cell means that 80% of the requests are unaffected by the failure.

In other words, failure isolation is the biggest benefit of a cell-based architecture.

In this post, we will learn about the various aspects of cell-based architecture and its various components in more detail.

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What is a Workload?