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Cell-Based Architecture Enhances Modern Distributed Systems

Cell-based architecture has emerged as a response to many challenges associated with distributed systems. It employs the bulkhead pattern to isolate failures to a fraction of the affected infrastructure footprint and prevent widespread impact. Cells can also help organize large architectures into domain-bound deployment and delivery units, which provides essential sociotechnical benefits.

However, they also offer an opportunity to group related application services into domain-specific clusters, aiding with architectural and organizational structures, promoting high cohesion and low coupling, and reducing the cognitive load on the engineering teams. While cell-based architectures offer many advantages in the context of distributed systems, implementing this approach requires additional effort and introduces challenges, so it may not be best suited for every organization like startups still iterating on product-market fit to invest in. First and foremost, any company that simply cannot afford widespread outages due to reputational, financial, or contractual requirements should strongly consider adopting cell-based architecture, if not for all, at least for critical user-facing services.

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