Cell-Based Architecture
Complete isolated copies each serving a subset of customers.
5 to work through
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A SaaS platform has had three full outages this year, each affecting all customers. Propose an architectural response.
2 min answer -
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A platform serving hundreds of millions of users adopts cell-based architecture. What does it buy that redundancy does not, and what does it cost?
2 min answer -
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A platform with extreme peaks keeps having total outages caused by bad deployments and poisonous requests. Which pattern addresses this, and what does it cost?
2 min answer -
advanced
Alibaba reported a peak of 583000 order creations per second during Singles' Day in 2020. A system that idles at a small fraction of that for 364 days cannot be validated by ordinary load testing. What does an organisation have to build to make that peak survivable, and where would copying it be a mistake?
3 min answer -
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Your multi-tenant API assigns each customer to one of eight worker pools by hash. One customer's traffic pattern regularly degrades their pool. Improve it.
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
AWS: Shuffle Sharding
Assigning each customer a random subset of workers rather than a fixed shard, so that one abusive tenant affects almost nobody else.
patternCell
A complete, independent instance of a system serving a subset of customers, sharing no state with other cells - so that almost every class of failure…
patternCell Router
The thin shared component that maps a customer to their cell - the one part of a cell-based architecture that is not isolated, and therefore the part…
patternCell-Based Architecture
Running many complete, independent copies of the stack, each serving a subset of users, so any failure is confined to one cell.
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Patterns
General material on architectural patterns and their trade-offs.
Layered Architecture
The default shape, its clarity, and where a technical partition fails.
Event-Driven Architecture
Publishing facts, and trading comprehensibility for decoupling.
Pipes and Filters
Independent transformation steps composed into a pipeline.
Publish/Subscribe
Broadcast to every subscriber, as distinct from work distribution.
Competing Consumers
Scaling throughput with instances, at the cost of ordering.
Saga
Local transactions with compensating actions across services.
CQRS
Separate models for writing and reading, each optimised for its job.
Event Sourcing
The event log as the system of record, with state as a projection.
Outbox
Making the event atomic with the business write it describes.
Strangler Fig
Incremental replacement behind a routing facade.
Anti-Corruption Layer
Translating a foreign model at the boundary so it does not leak in.
Sidecar & Ambassador
Cross-cutting behaviour in a co-deployed process.
Service Mesh
Sidecars applied estate-wide, and the scale at which that pays.
API Gateway
A single entry point for policy, routing and protocol translation.
Backend for Frontend
A narrow backend per client experience, owned by that client's team.
Sharding Patterns
Directory versus embedded keys, logical shards and rebalancing.
Materialized Views
Precomputed query results, refreshed incrementally or in full.
Orchestration vs Choreography
A coordinator that knows the flow, or services that react to events.