Cell-Based Architecture Enhances Modern Distributed Systems

Poor Alan Kay not even getting a mention for pioneering the basis for this idea in the design of Smalltalk.

I thought this is about propagators [1], but it is not.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;54635" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;54635</a>

There is so much our software needs to improve to reach the level of sophistication of even plants :-)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inquisitivebiologist.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;book-review-the-revolutionary-genius-of-plants-a-new-understanding-of-plant-intelligence-and-behavior&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inquisitivebiologist.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;book-review-the-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stigmergy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stigmergy</a>

While cell-based services make sense for critical applications, not all services require this approach from a Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) perspective. In practice, I&#x27;ve observed that companies often adopt an all-or-nothing approach to cell-based services, resulting in inflated COGS, increased operational overhead, and unnecessary complexity.

Worked for a large SaaS provider and the cell based architecture was seen as “too cumbersome” and less cost efficient. Ultimately, cell based architectures can be great for the reasons they mentioned, they just need a bit more tooling around them to prevent operational toil.

I was thinking about cell-based distributed systems years ago and I haven´t yet figured out how to handle their complexity, unreliable connectivity and, as always, what use cases there might even be.

So what defines the boundary of the cell? Is it the Load Balancer or Kubernetes cluster?

As if microservices weren&#x27;t complicated enough, lets add sharding on top of it.