Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 12, 2012

Cell Architectures (adding dashes of heterogeneity)

Cell Architectures

From the post:

A consequence of Service Oriented Architectures is the burning need to provide services at scale. The architecture that has evolved to satisfy these requirements is a little known technique called the Cell Architecture.

A Cell Architecture is based on the idea that massive scale requires parallelization and parallelization requires components be isolated from each other. These islands of isolation are called cells. A cell is a self-contained installation that can satisfy all the operations for a shard. A shard is a subset of a much larger dataset, typically a range of users, for example.

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.

The intersection of semantic heterogeneity and scaling remains largely unexplored.

I suggest scaling in a homogeneous environment and then adding dashes of heterogeneity to see what breaks.

Adjust and try again.

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