Big news today from Microsoft with the announcement of Service Fabric, Redmond's product answering the needs of not only the future of PaaS (platform as a service) but also the way applications are built and run.
Microsoft has an interesting history with PaaS. It's Azure cloud computing solution was, in its first iteration, a PaaS by most definitions of the term at that time. When Azure was introduced, Microsoft was criticized for not having an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since then,
That would appear to be changing with the announcement today of ServiceFabric. It needs to be added that this is a pre-announcement but in a discussion prior to the launch, Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's CTO of Azure indicated that the product launch would happen sooner rather than later. Russinovich told me that some external beta customers are already using the product but that Microsoft has in fact been using the technologies within its own projects for the past five years. Lync, Cortana and Service Bus among other solutions are actually built and deployed using ServiceFabric.
Microsoft firmly believes that the future of application development for all organizations will be created using microservices. Microservices is a modern take on software architecture, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task. The rise of Docker, the proliferation of third party developer tools and the increasing reliance on the cloud all play into the growth of microservices.
So what is ServiceFabric? At its base, ServiceFabric is a platform upon which a user assigns a cluster of resources, be they virtual or physical. ServiceFabric then takes care of deploying predetermined templates for development or production. The fabric takes care of getting all the different microservices deployed. ServiceFabric takes care of the minutiae involved in running these microservices - routing, replications and the recovery of replicas, partitioning - all these important but largely vanilla operations are taken care of by the platform.
From PCs to vaccines, find out how Bill Gates made his mark on the world.
Russinovich gave me the example of the Azure Database. The service supports two million active databases underneath which are tens of thousands of servers. All of this runs on top of ServiceFabric. The whole shebang consists of a dozen or more microservices - stateless frontend ones and stateful backend ones. ServiceFabric doesn't require Microsoft to externalize the statefulness of parts of the stack. That approach, says Russinovich, caused inefficiencies since state and compute are separate. This traditionally means that developers need to rework the whole as stateless even if they are, in fact, stateful. ServiceFabric removes this need as it supports stateful applications from the outset. According to Russinovich, Service Fabric offers the following benefits:
- 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.
Russinovich is understandably bullish about ServiceFabric and contends that it is the first PaaS to be built in a natural microservices way. He also added that a public preview for Windows will be available in a few months with Linux coming soon thereafter.
No pricing has yet been set for ServiceFabric, one assumes that it will be before the actual launch.
