Azure Service Fabric Gets Open Source Treatment -- Visual Studio Magazine

Azure Service Fabric Gets Open Source Treatment

Azure Service Fabric team hopes to spur improvements to Service Fabric .NET SDK through the open source community. ASF and the SDK have also recently been updated.

By Michael Domingo
03/27/2017

Count Azure Service Fabric among yet another Microsoft service being open sourced, as the Azure Service Fabric team announced in a blog that it has recently released portions of the Service Fabric .NET SDK on GitHub.

Azure Service Fabric is described by a Microsoft Doc as its microservices platform, aimed at the development of microservices "that run at very high density on a shared pool of machines, which is referred to as a cluster." Azure Service Fabric is also meant to be scalable, providing "comprehensive application management capabilities to provision, deploy, monitor, upgrade/patch, and delete deployed applications."

Microsoft lists its own Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, Cortana, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Intune and a number of other core Azure services among the apps and services running on Azure Service Fabric. The Service Fabric .NET SDK itself is a developer-specific environment that allows for full lifecycle development of microservices without having to connect to a private or public cloud.

The Service Fabric .NET SDK is available at https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric.

It's not quite fully open sourced, though: "Although we were able to separate the .NET SDK source code from internal dependencies, our development process still relies on internal tools, and so we will continue to do our own development in a private repo for the time being," notes the blog. "At each SDK release, we will push our latest changes back out to GitHub."

As noted in the blog, for now the only packages being open sourced are Reliable Services, Reliable Actors, Service Remoting, and ASP.NET Core integration. "The Service Fabric runtime is not available today as an open source project," notes the README file on GitHub. "As we collect feedback and run tests on contributions, we will determine the best time to open source the runtime, which includes the clustering layers and the Reliable Collections replicated persisted store."

Azure Service Fabric and Service Fabric .NET SDK have recently gone through updates. ASF is at 5.5, and the SDK is at 2.5. New in those releases is support for compressed packages, an increase in the default health check duration for error catching during automated upgrade rollback, and full support for ASP.NET Core within stateless and stateful Reliable Services packages. More about those updates is here.

About the Author

Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.

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