The number of microservices running in enterprises increases daily. As a result, service composition, governance, security, and observability are becoming a challenge to implement and incorporate. A cell-based architecture is an approach that can be applied to current or desired development and technologies to address these issues. This technology-neutral approach helps cloud-native dev teams become more efficient, act in a more self-organized manner, and speed up overall release times. Asanka Abeysinghe offers an overview of a cell-based reference architecture that is API-centric, cloud native, and microservices friendly. You’ll learn the role of APIs in the cell-based approach and examine how real applications are built as cells. Along the way, Asanka explores metrics and approaches that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the architecture and demonstrates how organizations can implement the cell approach.

1. Asanka Abeysinghe
Cell-based Architecture
An Emerging Architecture Pattern for Agile Integration
Deputy CTO & VP, Architecture - CTO Office
WSO2 Inc.

2. Motivation

3. Centralized & Layered
picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaktuslampa/

4. Not enough support for Agility

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Powerpoint Architects

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Reality of the Enterprise

7. Brownfield > Greenfield
picture credit: https://www.apstra.com/home/landscape-of-meadow-field-with-the-changing-environment-2/
Legacy, monolithic Microservices, sprawl

8. Reference Implementations
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Underutilization of the Technology

10. Gap: architecture | development | deployment
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Dependency management

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Architecture Patterns

13. Timeline

14. Background: Layered Architecture

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A platform with an agile team
100 APIs, 60 message flows, 80 services, n DBs
Multi-tenanted, 3 active tenants
First release after 3 years

16. picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/imcountingufoz/
Rise of Microservices

17. Pragmatic Microservices
Netflix: APIs
Uber: Edge Gateway
eBay: API Facade
Gartner: Mini Services

18. Background: Layered Architecture with MSA

21. Background: Segmented Architecture
BS-1 BS-2 BS-n
G-1 G-2
US-1 US-n

22. Platform of Platforms
Platform (shared capabilities)
Project1
Project2
Project3
Projectn
Platform (shared capabilities)
Project1
Project2
Project3
Projectn
Platform (shared capabilities)
Project1
Project2
Project3
Projectn
Platform (shared capabilities)
Project1
Project2
Project3
Projectn
CI/CD
User
Store

23. picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ableman/

24. Making of……
picture credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Frank_Schulenburg CC BY 3.0

26. Building the
Concept

27. Business vs technical services
picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arpadlukacs/

28. Service: Technical definition
A code exposes through an
interface that describes a
collection of operations that
are network accessible using
a standardized messaging
protocol.

29. Microservice: Technical definition
A microservice must have a
single purpose and be loosely
coupled in design and
deployed independently of
other microservices.
"Micro" is a concept of scope
rather than size.

30. Service: Business definition
Software components that
can be spontaneously
discovered, combined, and
recombined to provide a
solution to a business
problem.

31. Microservice: Business definition
Microservices is an approach to
application development in
which a large application is built
as a suite of modular
components or services.
These services are built around
business capabilities.

32. Group of (Micro)services

33. The cell is the basic structural,
functional, and
biological unit of all known
living organisms

34. Cell-based
Reference Architecture

35. Component: Atomic Units
A component represents a
process or business logic
running in a container,
serverless environment, or an
existing runtime. A component
is designed based on a specific
scope, which can be
independently run and reused
at the runtime.

36. Cell: Units of Enterprise Architecture
A cell is a collection of
components, grouped from
design and implementation
into deployment. A cell is
independently deployable,
manageable, and observable.

37. Cell: Units of Enterprise Architecture
A cell is an immutable application component that can be built,
deployed and managed as a complete unit.
The cell consists of multiple services, managed APIs, ingress and
egress policies (including routing, throttling, access control),
security trust domain, deployment policies, rolling update policies
and external dependencies.
The cell definition captures all of these in a standard technology-
neutral fashion.

38. Cell:Component
1:M
1:1

39. Connected Cells
picture credit: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

40. Control Plane:
- Signaling of the network
- Makes decisions about the traffic flow
Data Plane:
- Forwards traffic between hops
- Takes data packets
picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/teflon/

41. Inter and Intra Cell communication

42. Inter and Intra Cell communication
Cell-mesh
Global-mesh

43. Connected Cells
Cell gateway (ingress)
Sidecar (egress)
Adaptor (egress)
Ambassador (egress)

44. API-centric Architecture

45. API-centric Architecture Pull APIs
- RESTful HTTP, GRPc
Push APIs
- Events JMS, AMQP, SMTP
- Streams Kafka, MQTT

46. Gateway Pattern
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47. Automated Governance (Re)-enables Flow
Policy Store
(Registry)
Observability
(Monitoring/
Analytics)
Policy
Enforcement
(GW)
Automated governance is made
of three things:
A source of truth:
Policy store/registry
Enforcement of the policy
Gateway or plugin attempting to keep
the desired state
Observability
How close to the desired state are we?

48. Security of Cells
picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurelfan/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/sahdblunders/

49. Security of Cells

50. Developer Experience (DX)
of a Cell

51. Creating Cells
Brand new Cell
Existing (micro)services
Update an existing Cell
Create a new version

53. Lifecycle of a Cell

55. picture credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rincon_de_lula/

56. Structured Agility
Versioned Components
Versioned Cells
Dependency managed
Autowired
Reusable
Enhanced MSA & CNA

57. Cell-based Enterprise
Architecture

59. Cell Types
Cell Type Components
Cloud-native (default) Microservices, Functions, MicroGateways, lightweight storages
Integration MicroESB or other integration microservices, lightweight storage and/or cache
Legacy Existing systems, legacy services
External SaaS and partner systems
Data RDBMS, NoSQL, File, Message Broker*
Identity IDP, user stores
Channel Web Apps, IoT, mobile apps

60. Reference Implementation L0

62. Reference Implementation L1

64. Cells and Podular Organizations

65. Measure the success
picture credit: https://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/direct-marketing/running-a-direct-mail-campaign/getting-the-measure-of-your-marketing

66. https://www.tasktop.com/blog/5-best-metrics-youve-never-met/
https://dzone.com/articles/reducing-mttr
Mean Time to Repair

67. Self-contained
Deployable as a unit
Independently elastic
Data plane and control plane
Summary: Cell-based Reference Architecture

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Just a (steady) start
https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture

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From Theory to Practice
https://github.com/wso2/reference-methodology

70. Transformation is a journey
without a destination. - Marilyn Ferguson
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71. Rate today’s session
Session page on oreillysacon.com/ny O’Reilly Events App

72. @asankama
THANK YOU
Meet the Experts: Table C - Feb, 6th 10:15 - 10:45 AM