Azure Service Fabric for Microservice Architecture

There are certain tools that make the transition to a true micro service architecture more doable and beneficial. One of these tools is Azure service fabric. The developers of Service Fabric have gone thought the pain points of implementing microservices for the rest of us, and so we get to skip that and enjoy the benefits to building and maintaining a micro service architecture without them.

Some of the benefits of converting to microservices is ease of deployments, such as much shorter build times for individual projects and the ability deploy portions of a system independent of each other. This is increasingly important as “monolithic” applications continue to grow in size and scope.

Some of the specific benefits of Service Fabric is a centralized UI to view the status of the various services in an environment:

As you can see from the image above, it offers a robust interface in which you can view an even control behavior of the different nodes and applications associated with the cluster.

There are certain hooks you have to put into your application in order for the service fabric dashboard to communicate with your service, but once those hooks are in place you get all this UI functionality for free. Also, service fabric takes care of the scaling issues associated with growth, so that is backed into the solution as well. You can create additional “actors” or process that process data, at will across a single or multiple nodes to scale.