8. Azure Service Fabric

Over the last couple of chapters, we have seen that building highly available, resilient and performant microservices requires more than just containers. We need additional system services for cluster management, services for container or service orchestration, service registration, service discovery, and service monitoring. Mesosphere DCOS or Mesos proper, Zookeeper, Marathon, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes are currently the most popular services to help address those areas and are frequently used together. Separately within Microsoft, Azure has built Azure Service Fabric as a platform to build exactly these types of highly available, resilient, and performant microservices. It provides cluster management, service orchestration, service registration, service discovery, service monitoring, and more in a single cohesive platform, thereby eliminating the need to manage multiple systems. Many Microsoft services such as Azure DB, Cortana and Intune, to name just a few, have been using Azure Service Fabric as their platform for the last five years. Azure Service Fabric is currently available as a public preview and will be made generally available in the first half of 2016.

Service Fabric plays an important part in Microsoft’s Azure strategy, and thus we need to understand what Service Fabric is and how we can use it. This chapter provides a high-level overview of Service Fabric with the goal of making us aware of its features, and how we can think about Service Fabric concepts in the context of what we have learned so far.