Microsoft enters the PaaS market with Azure Service Fabric

Cloud computing has stepped up the pace of app development, with many businesses coming under pressure to deliver new services fast.

Following on from last month's launch of the Azure IoT Suite, tech giant Microsoft is stepping into the platform as a service (PaaS) space with Azure Service Fabric.

Mark Russinovich CTO of Microsoft Azure writing on the company's Azure blog says, "Service Fabric was born from our years of experience delivering mission-critical cloud services and has been in production for more than five years. It provides the foundational technology upon which we run our Azure core infrastructure and also powers services like Skype for Business, InTune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database (across more than 1.4 million customer databases) and Bing Cortana -- which can scale to process more than 500 million evaluations per second".

The platform is designed to understand the available infrastructure resources and needs of applications, enabling automatic updating and self-healing so that highly available and durable services can be delivered at hyper-scale. Russinovich adds, "We're now making this battle-hardened technology available for everyone use -- not a version of what we use, but the exact technology we use ourselves".

Key features of Service Fabric include support for creating both stateless and stateful microservices -- meaning that complex applications are made up of small, independent processes talking to each other using APIs -- allowing it to power complex, low-latency, data-intensive scenarios and scale them into the cloud.

This approach makes it easy to roll out changes to parts of an application and to reverse them if things go wrong without needing to rebuild the whole thing. It also allows for efficient load management as Service Fabric can, for example, launch more instances of a service that's under heavy demand.

It 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 whether in test or production environments.

Whilst it will be aimed at Windows development initially, Russinovich says Linux support will be offered in future. More information will be available at next week's Microsoft Build developer conference.