Cell-based architecture
Running several full, isolated copies of a system (cells), each serving a share of customers, so a failure or bad deploy hits one cell only.
A thin routing layer maps each customer to a cell; each cell has its own services and databases. New releases go to one cell first, and a runaway customer or a corrupt deploy cannot take down the others. Large cloud providers use it to limit blast radius. The costs are more infrastructure, moving customers between cells, and reports that span cells.
Related terms
- Blast radius: How much of a system, and how many customers, a single failure, bad deploy or leaked key can affect.
- Multi-tenancy (multi-tenant SaaS): One application and one deploy serving many client companies, with each client’s data kept apart.
- Bulkhead pattern: Giving each dependency or workload its own limited pool of connections or workers, so one slow part cannot use up everything.
