[HN Gopher] Cell-Based Architecture Explained, with Zombies
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Cell-Based Architecture Explained, with Zombies
Author : madflojo
Score : 33 points
Date : 2025-02-06 12:52 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bencane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bencane.com)
| ji_reilly wrote:
| " A cell router is responsible for detecting failure within a
| cell (Zombie outbreak) and rerouting requests (Citizens) to other
| neighborhoods."
|
| Misleading. The difference between a pure horizontally-scaled
| cluster and cell-based architecture is that traffic destined for
| a compromised cell does not get routed to a healthy cell. Fault
| isolation (preventing noisy neighbors and poison pills from
| spilling over to progressively more cells) is a primary tenet of
| cell-based architecture.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| How would you maintain high availability? I assume something
| like what AWS proposes[1] where you have an independent routing
| layer and each cell still has a gateway, but cells do not re-
| route requests to other cells.
|
| [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/guidance/cell-based-
| archite...
| withinboredom wrote:
| If a cell dies, oh well. You then run a "rebalance" job to
| move users off the dead cell. If the cell has downtime, that
| doesn't apply to your overall downtime. In other words, maybe
| all central-us customers cannot use your service; but it
| eventually comes back up. If it is dead-dead (ie, nuke or
| catastrophic failure), then you would migrate those users to
| a new cell -- at the expense of latency for those users.
| bpicolo wrote:
| If failed cells cause immediate re-routing to other cells,
| you get a lot of fun new cascading failure scenarios to think
| about.
| alienchow wrote:
| It would be part of your architecture design trade off.
| Disregarding whatever AWS peddles, you can have a cellular
| infrastructure (like Google), but have non-cellular systems
| architecture built on top of it (still deployed across
| different cells but the dependent services in the critical
| path residing in different cells or regions depending on
| resource availability and/or use case). The reroutes can
| occur at the global load balancer level, or it can happen at
| your own FE service. Or you could just drain the cell from
| the load balancer and the client retries go to a separate
| cell. Or you could have the load balancer not failover at all
| in case, which is generally the recommendation to prevent
| cascading failure.
|
| It's down to your own design and acceptable business
| decisions, and what your business deems as availability.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| I'm sure this will come in handy for me at some point. I've led a
| team through moving parts of their terraform/aws monolith to
| cells. Some people are able to grasp what cell-based architecture
| is and when it's useful pretty easily, but for a few it just
| doesn't click.
| nsbk wrote:
| I came here for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture and was very
| excited about the whole zombie idea -_-
| shae wrote:
| I'd play this tower defense game where I have to organize my city
| to resist zombies.
| pithanyChan wrote:
| i can't understand how there hasn't been a single game for the
| CLI. RTS tower defense, rogue-like & dota, infocom games/caves
| of qud.
|
| should run on old ThinkPads. uh, maybe you can makes it one of
| those Challenges @ lewd game weekend hacksaton or something!!!
| uuuuuh, exciting!
| pithanyChan wrote:
| what's the refractory period doin in neighboring cells and
| infected cells? what happens to that mechanism?
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(page generated 2025-02-09 23:01 UTC)