[chuckledog]

According to Alan Kays 1971 description of Smalltalk:

“An object is a little computer that has its own memory, you send messages to it in order to tell it to do something. It can interact with other objects through messages in order to get that task done.”

Smalltalk concepts heavily informed the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tenets, e.g.

1. Services are autonomous - Cohesive single responsibility.

2. Services have explicit boundaries - Loosely coupled, owns its data and business rules.

Choosing good service boundaries is really crucial for a successful, resilient, maintainable system.

There’s a nice synopsis at https://hemantkumar.net/services-microservices-bounded-conte... (2015)

“Cells” seems like the same thing but it’s IMO a nicer word for it.

[macintux]

The impression I got from the document is that cells don’t communicate much with each other. They’re effectively multiple copies of the same cluster of services.

Cells could certainly encapsulate multiple microservices, but I don’t see a strong correlation between Smalltalk objects and cells. That may just be a lack of imagination on my part.

[siscia]

Hummmm while there might be some similarities the concept are not that close.

Cells are usually used to reduce blast radius and to force design that can scale.

It is a bit like a multi-AZ/multi datacenter architecture where however cells can share the same AS/datacenter. But nothing else.

So cells can share physical hardware but not logical components.

If you were to create a cell based architecture, you might have 9 cells over 3 AZ each using a different S3 bucket and DynamoDB table. For 9 S3 buckets and 9 DDB table in total.