Service Fabric can rebalance services deployed on a cluster as a part of orchestration activities. This can be caused by resource balancing activities, failovers, upgrades, scale-outs, or scale-ins. This will result in changes in service endpoint addresses as the services move across different virtual machines.

The Service Fabric Naming Service is responsible for abstracting this complexity from the consuming service or application. The Naming Service takes care of service discovery and resolution. All service instances in Service Fabric are identified by a unique URL such as fabric:/MyMicroServiceApp/AppService1. This name stays constant across the lifetime of the service, although the endpoint addresses which physically host the service may change. Internally, Service Fabric manages a map between the service names and the physical location where the service is hosted. This is similar to the DNS service which is used to resolve website URLs to IP addresses.

The following figure illustrates the name resolution process for a service hosted on Service Fabric: