FAQ
What about shuffle-sharding?
A question often asked is whether shuffle-sharding is the same as cell-based or how they are related. Although shuffle-sharding is an excellent fault-isolating mechanism, they are not the same thing. The basic idea of shuffle-sharding is to generate shards as we might deal hands from a deck of cards. Take the eight instances example. Previously, we divided it into four shards of two instances. With shuffle-sharding, the shards contain two random instances, and the shards, just like our hands of cards, might have some overlap.
In a cell-based architecture, a cell should be self-contained, not share its state. We can use shuffle-sharding within a cell, but cross-cells should not be used by definition. Shuffle-sharding can also be a bit trickier for stateful components. To learn more about shuffle-sharding, here are two great articles: