Microsoft has announced and made available the preview of Azure Service Fabric (ASF), a cloud platform including a runtime and lifecycle management tools for creating, deploying, running and managing microservices. ASF microservices can be deployed on Azure or on-premises on Windows Server private or hosted clouds. Support for Linux is to come in the future.
According to Microsoft, microservices are small pieces of code plus configuration and data, independently versioned, deployed and scaled on clusters containing up to thousands of machines, and communicating with each other through well defined protocols and interfaces. Microservices are developed in any language and framework by small teams. Microservices can be stateless or stateful. Both types of microservices can have state, but in the case of the former state is kept on an external storage machine, while for the later the entire service along with its state is replicated on different nodes of the cluster. ASF enables two programming models: Reliable Services – providing an API for performing tasks involving the state of multiple services, and Reliable Actors – providing an API for applications built around the Actor model and using independent units of state.
Service Fabric is Microsoft’s own platform used internally to run Azure, being used for services such as Skype for Business, Azure SQL, Cortana, InTune or DocumentDB. ASF has built-in microservice automation, orchestration, resilience, scalability, monitoring and diagnosing capabilities.
For development, Azure Fabric Service requires VS 2015 RC, an SDK and PowerShell. For more details, we recommend the recent session Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Architecture from Build 2015 and the ASF Documentation.