Cell Based Architecture for Early Stage SaaS SaaS for Developers

In the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community for a while now.

I was lucky that Eno Thereska called me and suggested to do just that! Eno, currently at Alcion, is one of the most impressive technical leaders I’ve head the pleasure of working with. He has deep theoretical knowledge that he knows how to use for very practical technical solutions. And in this presentation and discussion, he shares both theory and practical advice.

We discussed everything from the basics of cell based architectures, their benefits all the way to different heuristics for assigning tenants to cells.

Papers and talks we discussed:

AWS Fargate under the hood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-zOaBGyEA
Doordash - Journey to cell-based micro services architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRrhU-yRjg
Slack’s Migration to Cellular Architecture: https://slack.engineering/slacks-migration-to-a-cellular-architecture/
Kora: A cloud-native event streaming platform for Kafka: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf