infospace-bench/infospaces/patterns-of-it-securita-architecture/artifacts/entities/pattern-cell-based-architecture.md

Pattern: Cell-based Architecture

Status: seed Readiness target: RL3 production Primary owners: Railiance platform, product repos Genesis family: Tenant isolation

Problem

Large multi-tenant systems need blast-radius control when a single shared runtime or data plane would make incidents too broad.

Context

Use this pattern when tenants can be grouped into cells, shards, or regional service instances with independent capacity, deployment, and failure boundaries.

Forces

• Cells reduce blast radius and scaling contention.
• Routing and tenant placement become platform responsibilities.
• Identity, policy, and audit must work across cells.
• Cross-cell operations need strict control and observability.

Solution

Assign tenants to isolated cells that contain runtime, data, or service subsystems. Keep global control-plane operations minimal and require tenant-to-cell mapping in deployment, routing, policy, and audit.

Verification

• Tenant-to-cell placement is explicit and auditable.
• Failure in one cell does not grant access to another cell.
• Deployments can be rolled out cell by cell.
• Cross-cell administrative actions are explicitly authorized.

Related Patterns

• Tenant Isolation.
• Tenant Context Propagation.
• Central Audit Ledger.
• Kill Switch / Tenant Freeze.