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Overview

This Guidance helps customers understand the concepts of implementing a cell-based architecture. This architecture shows fault isolation between cells, which are independent replicas of the system. Customers can use this Guidance to prevent outages caused by a software bug, failed deployment, or overload, ultimately reducing the impact to end-customers.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Deploy with confidence

Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs. 

Go to sample code

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

By isolating faults to business service partitions, this Guidance promotes operational excellence by ensuring that the business can continue to run services. This aligns fault isolation with individual users or sets of users. In contrast to the more traditional approach, which has users in the same failure domain of a single business system, this new approach has users in different failure domains.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

Any use of cryptography is kept at a minimum with the intention of it being replaced for production use. Randomly generated API keys and JSON Web tokens are used for authentication.

Read the Security whitepaper

This Guidance implements the Well-architected best practice of a cellular architecture.

Read the Reliability whitepaper

To ensure cost optimization, only the smallest AWS Fargate container instance types are used. Deployment and workflows run on Step Functions to minimize compute cost. Monitoring uses synthetic canaries that are started only when needed.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.