[otterley]

GLBs aren’t SPOFs. They are typically deployed around the world redundantly, often using Anycast IPs or using DNS geographic and failover records, and are stateless. Think AWS Global Accelerator and Route 53 as an example. The architecture diagram is a high level simplification.

[orochimaaru]

I don't think the global transaction router is a GLB. Having dabbled in this for high traffic telemetry gathering infrastructure, I will hazard a guess and say the "router" isn't a GLB.

The router needs to be shard-aware. It needs to know what data is where based on the request coming in so that it can route accurately. A GLB is DNS. It cannot be shard-aware because all it knows is the FQDN being resolved.

It can be a "router" if all the router needs to know is to resolve to the nearest data center or the nearest CDN. But at that point I have to ask the question - why does one need a cell-based architecture and can't it just be geo-redundant active-active failover across regions.

In any sense, the architecture itself isn't novel or new. It's documented here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reducing-.... It's the go to model if you're running a cloud.

[otterley]

Active/active without sharding is not a horizontal scaling model, and the blast radius of a fault is wide.

One can have GLBs that do routing. So long as the tenant-to-cell routing tables are consistent, it works fine. And those mappings tend not to change frequently.

[themafia]

A large portion of DNS is outside of your control. You're relying on at least two third parties you have indirect relationships with in order to work. If you're outside of the standard TLDs you've got additional social factors that can control your resolution.

Granted. It works really well in practice. It should be noted we haven't actually had the world war the Internet was designed to survive. So we're not entirely clear on the semantics of operations in unusual and unexpected configurations. I would expect DNS to be the first shoe to drop there.

[wbl]

GLBs absolutely can be SPOF for certain kind of administrative mistakes.

[otterley]

If you’re counting administrative mistakes (human error), anything can fail. Let’s not shift the goalposts.

[lokar]

That depends on your change control process