A machine or VM that is part of a cluster is called a node. A node might be a a physical or virtual machine. A node in Service Fabric is identified by its string name. A cluster may have heterogeneous nodes and more nodes can be added to the existing capacity to scale out the cluster.

Each node on the cluster has Service Fabric runtime binaries installed in it. When the node starts, an auto-start Service Fabric runtime service named FabricHost.exe spins up two executables on the node which make up the node:

• Fabric.exe: This executable is responsible for managing the lifetime of the Microservices hosted on the node
• FabricGateway.exe: This executable is responsible for managing communication between the nodes