Build: Microservices on Azure

Besides App Services, Azure offers an alternative that is slightly to the left of the far right on the big IaaS to PaaS scale called Azure Service Fabric. Conceptually Service Fabric is based on containers, allowing you to fit many services into a single VM and it gives you more fine grained control than with App Services by providing a manifest describing how it should operate.

Service Fabric acts as a platform for microservices - taking up the competition with Google and Amazon in this area - and it offers:

- An actor programming model that is inspired by the Orleans project
- Low latency
- High availability
- Stateful services
- Load balancing
- Replication and failover
- Rolling upgrades
- High dencity (many many services on a single VM)

If you are worried about an offering of this size in a version 1.0, then you can rest assured as the platform has existed and been used by Microsoft for their own services for more than 5 years. To name a few it is the platform that runs Cortana, Office 365 and DocumentDB.

A brand new Developer SDK is released at Build, so it is definately one of the areas that I will be looking at in the comming months.