Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform built for microservices and containers. It can act as a PaaS with its reliable services, or like a container orchestrator with its ability to manage containers. What distinguishes Service Fabric though are programming models such as Reliable Actors built on top of reliable services. When it comes to IoT use cases, for example, Reliable Actors offers some compelling advantages — in addition to the reliability and platform benefits of being on Service Fabric, you also get its state management and replication capabilities. In keeping with continued focus on open source software (OSS), Microsoft will be transitioning Service Fabric to an open development process on Github. All this makes Azure Service Fabric worth trialling — particularly for organizations who are invested in the .NET framework.
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform built for microservices and containers. It’s comparable to container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, but also works with plain old services. It can be used in a bewildering array of ways, starting from simple services in your language of choice to Docker containers or services built using an SDK. Since its release a couple of years ago, it has steadily added more features, including Linux container support. Kubernetes has been the poster child of container orchestration tools, but Service Fabric is the default choice for .NET applications. We're using it in a few projects at ThoughtWorks and we like what we’ve seen so far.
