Microsoft has just announced a brand new service called Azure Service Fabric. The service is designed for enabling developers and ISVs to build cloud services with high scalability and customization. It is the same foundational technology that Microsoft uses to power its own services (e.g. Skype, InTune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, etc.)
The target for Azure Service Fabric seems to be ISVs and developers who are building hyper scale APIs, products and services.
The most interesting statement is this one:
With our unique commitment to deliver a consistent cloud across public, hosted and private clouds, we will deliver the solution on-premises in the next version of Windows Server.
It is assumed this means that the same technologies, APIs, dev tools, etc. will work with on premise, hybrid and cloud scenarios.
Key benefits that Microsoft is targeting include:
- It supports creating both stateless and stateful microservices – an architectural approach where complex applications are composed of small, independently versioned services – to power the most complex, low-latency, data-intensive scenarios and scale them into the cloud.
- Provides the benefits of orchestration and automation for microservices with new levels of app awareness and insight.
- Solves hard distributed systems problems like state management and provides application lifecycle management capabilities so developers don’t have to re-architect their applications as usage grows.
- Includes Visual Studio tooling as well as command line support, which enables developers to quickly and easily build, test, debug, deploy and update their Service Fabric applications on single-box deployments, test deployments and production deployments.
A preview version of this service will be released at the upcoming BUILD conference.
