Cells are essentially a cluster of services that form some scalable part of the architecture. Cells are self-contained and can be swapped out as needed. Each cell will generally serve a specific portion of traffic. If a cell fails, then only a subset of users are affected.
My original thought of the size of a cell is much smaller than the examples give. For example, a cell may have a cluster of 50 or more servers. Obviously, these are larger companies that have large cells like this. Still, it's interesting to think about how cells could be put together on a smaller basis, depending on need.
From the article:
Cell Architectures have several advantages:
- Cells provide a unit of parallelization that can be adjusted to any size as the user base grows.
- Cell are added in an incremental fashion as more capacity is required.
- Cells isolate failures. One cell failure does not impact other cells.
- Cells provide isolation as the storage and application horsepower to process requests is independent of other cells.
- Cells enable nice capabilities like the ability to test upgrades, implement rolling upgrades, and test different versions of software.
- Cells can fail, be upgraded, and distributed across datacenters independent of other cells.
Enjoy!
- Craig
