Cellular architecture is a design pattern that helps achieve high availability in multi-tenant applications. The goal is to design an application so all its components can be deployed into an isolated “cell” that is entirely self-sufficient. Then, many discrete deployments of these “cells” can be created without dependencies.
Each cell is a fully operational, autonomous instance of your application that is ready to serve traffic without dependencies on or interactions with other cells.
Traffic from users can be distributed across these cells, and if an outage occurs in one cell, it will only impact the users in that cell while the other cells remain fully operational. This minimizes the “blast radius” of any outages the service may experience and helps ensure that the outage doesn’t impact the SLA for most users.
There are many different strategies for organizing your cells and deciding which traffic should be routed to which cell. For more information on the benefits of cellular architecture and some examples of these different strategies, Peter Voshall’s talk from re:Invent 2018: "How AWS Minimizes the Blast Radius of Failures" is highly recommended.
Managing an application with many independent cells can be daunting. For this reason, building as much automation as possible for the common infrastructure tasks necessary for creating and maintaining cells is extremely valuable.
The full version of this article focuses less on the "why" of cellular architecture and more on the "how" of creating this automation.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Chris Price, "Architecting for High Availability in the Cloud with Cellular Architecture".
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