Last year, Microsoft announced Azure Service Fabric, which is a next-generation middleware cloud platform to build scalable, reliable, and managed enterprise applications. Microsoft is already using Service Fabric powers in many of its products, including Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, Cortana, and Power BI.
Mark Fussell writes about some of the key capabilities of Service Fabric in Overview of Service Fabric:
- Develop massively scalable applications that are self-healing.
- Develop with a "datacenter on your machine" approach. The local development environment is the same code that runs in the Azure datacenters.
- Develop applications composed of microservices, executables, and other application frameworks of your choice, such as ASP.NET, Node.js, etc.
- Develop stateless and stateful (micro)services and make these highly reliable.
- Simplify the design of your application by using stateful (micro)services in place of caches and queues.
- Deploy applications in seconds.
- Deploy to Azure or to on-premises clouds running Windows Server with zero code changes. Write once and then deploy to any Service Fabric cluster.
- Deploy applications at higher density than virtual machines, deploying hundreds or thousand of applications per machine.
- Deploy different versions of the same application side by side, each independently upgradable.
- Manage the lifecycle of your stateful applications without any downtime, including breaking and nonbreaking upgrades.
- Manage applications using .NET APIs, PowerShell, or REST interfaces.
- Upgrade and patch microservices within applications independently.
- Monitor and diagnose the health of your applications and set policies for performing automatic repairs.
- Scale up or scale down your Service Fabric cluster easily, knowing that the applications scale according to available resources.
- Watch the self-healing resource balancer orchestrate the redistribution of applications across the Service Fabric cluster to recover from failures and optimize the distribution of load based on available resources.
Here in this Channel9 video, Sean McKenna demonstrates how to create a simple application in Visual Studio 2015.
References:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-overview/
Channel9