Status: Active migration in progress. Migration-specific sections should be removed once complete, leaving a stable architecture reference.

Cells

Cell vs Locality

These are two different layers of the architecture.

Cell — a self-contained Sentry deployment that owns a subset of organizations. Each cell runs its own full stack — Getsentry, Snuba, Seer, Relay, Kafka, Symbolicator, and others — on an isolated network with no direct cell-to-cell communication. OrganizationMapping.cell_name records which cell an org lives in. See Paths Into a Cell for how cells communicate with the outside world.

Locality — a named collection of cells, representing either a data residency zone (for multi-tenant customers, e.g. "us", "de") or a dedicated deployment for a single customer (e.g. s4s2). Multi-tenant customers choose a locality when creating an organization; single-tenant localities are provisioned privately and not customer-selectable. Each locality maps to a subdomain (us.sentry.io, de.sentry.io or s4s2.sentry.io).