We are living in an era where digital services are rapidly changing the way enterprises operate their business. As consumers favor digital experiences for almost everything from shopping to banking and healthcare, enterprises are investing heavily in building their digital infrastructure to support growth.
Cloud-native applications have become a mainstay and the global market for the same is expected to be worth over USD 17 billion by 2028. The real challenge for enterprises however is not moving to cloud-native, but getting their bet right on the architecture adopted for their cloud-native applications.
Microservices have been a relief, but…
Rather than building and managing a large monolithic application, microservice architecture has become the preferred choice for enterprises in their cloud application development journey. But over time, the distributed and modular approach of microservices has found itself to be on the receiving end of trouble primarily because of their distributed nature. The infamous microservices sprawl issue coupled with communication challenges between modules created severe constraints on the scalability and resilience of enterprise applications.
Microservice applications were finding it extremely difficult to accommodate complex workloads at scale and the failure of modules impacted entire functionality for long hours. This was a huge challenge, especially for mission-critical scenarios like in banking and financial enterprises where resilience and fault tolerance must be extremely high. There had to be a way for enterprises to enjoy the flexibility of microservices but with better scalability at horizontal and vertical levels, and improved resilience. This is where Cell-based architecture came into the picture.
What is cell-based architecture?
In simple terms, cell-based architecture is an application design approach that works by providing granular independent cells for handling workloads. It is an advanced version of microservice architecture wherein large workloads are distributed among individual cells with each cell having an independent environment complete with execution resources like data stores, computational logic, etc. It can interact with other cells or external systems via APIs or standard messaging protocols.
The most important characteristic of cell-based architecture is that each cell is isolated and does not share its state with other cells. This helps in building resilience as points of failure do not spread to other cells thereby ensuring localized isolation and restoration in the event of a mishap in any cell without disrupting the application ecosystem.
The primary difference between microservices and cell-based architecture is that in the case of cell-based architecture, it is the processing of workloads that is distributed among different cells whereas in a microservices architecture, the application itself is split into modules. Each cell comprises a complete workload having all resources to work independently. They are managed seamlessly by a cell router that routes workload requests to appropriate cells and a control panel that handles all administrative functions like provisioning, migration, and decommissioning of cells over time.
Key benefits of cell-based architecture
In several ways, the working of cell-based architecture for cloud-native applications may be like microservices. Thanks to cell independence, specific workloads of the application can be given more focus as they can be isolated, scaled up personally, and managed with unique resources, all without disturbing the state of other workloads in the system.
Let us explore the key benefits that cloud-native applications built with cell-based architecture can experience:
- Horizontal scalability
One of the biggest advantages that cell-based architecture offers is the ability to scale horizontally within an application instance. The scalability can be configured to occur depending on the workload scale the application experiences in highly dynamic environments. When workload increases rapidly owing to different factors, more cells can be added to the network thereby ensuring easy accommodation of the increased workload. For example, a cell that deals with login workloads to a large portal or social media website can experience significant traffic at peak hours. More cells can be added to help the login system handle the rapid traffic acceleration effortlessly.
- Personalized resource optimization
The cells used for achieving such an architecture will be incredibly flexible. This means that they can be optimized to accommodate certain specific workloads or tasks within the enterprise application. The selected cell can be provisioned with additional resource configurations like extra memory or computing resources depending on the workload handled. Like microservices, each cell can be configured to work on different technology stacks, deployment strategies, and environment configurations.
- Fault tolerance
The cells within such a design are isolated from one another. With their independent existence, they also offer the benefit of not passing the negative impact of any problematic issue to other cells. Every individual cell can be replaced, repaired, or restarted in isolation. This allows them to be very resilient against failures and hence applications built with cell-based architecture can quickly bounce back from any disrupting events.
- Multi-tenancy
The same principle of the isolated existence of cells allows applications to offer multiple instances to different customers with ease. For a SaaS application, each tenant can be offered their unique cell wherein all operational resources and configurations are independently made available and managed without ever interfering with other tenants. Cell-based architecture is a very optimal choice for multi-tenant large SaaS applications.
The bottom line
Cell-based architecture offers a new dimension to cloud-native application development initiatives. Far stronger than microservices, enterprises building their key digital assets using cell-based architecture experience high levels of dynamic scalability and resilience.
However, the journey into cell-based architecture has its share of challenges. From the definition of cell boundaries to communication interface configurations and automation of deployment and scaling activities, many steps require expert guidance. This is where a reputed technology partner like Wissen can be a game changer. Get in touch with us to know more.
