Architecting for High Availability in the Cloud with Cellular Architecture
InfoQ Homepage Articles Architecting for High Availability in the Cloud with Cellular Architecture
Cellular architecture is a design pattern that helps achieve high availability in multi-tenant applications. The goal is to design your application so that you can deploy all of its components into an isolated "cell" that is fully self-sufficient. Then, you create many discrete deployments of these "cells" with no dependencies between them.
Each cell is a fully operational, autonomous instance of your application ready to serve traffic with no dependencies on or interactions with any other cells.
Traffic from your 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 your service may experience and helps ensure that the outage doesn’t impact your SLA for most of your 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, we highly recommend Peter Voshall’s talk from re:Invent 2018: "How AWS Minimizes the Blast Radius of Failures".
