When we talk about microservices in the .NET Core world, Azure Service Fabric is a name that is widely used for microservices. In this section, we will discuss Fabric services.
This is a platform that helps us with easy packaging, deployment, and managing scalable and reliable microservices (the container is also like Docker). Sometimes it is difficult to focus on your main responsibility as a developer, because of complex infrastructural problems. With the help of Azure Service Fabric, developers need not worry about infrastructure issues. Azure Service Fabric provides various technologies and comes as a bundle that has the power of Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Microsoft Power BI, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub, and many more core services.
According to the official documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-overview), we can define Azure Service Fabric as follows:
- Service fabric—any OS, any cloud: You just need to create a cluster of service fabric and this will run on Azure (cloud) or on-premises, on Linux, or on a Windows server. Moreover, you can also create clusters on other public clouds.
- Service fabric: Stateless and stateful microservices. With the help of service fabric, you can build applications as stateless or stateful.
According to its official documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/), we can define stateless microservices as follows:
Full support for application lifecycle management: With the help of service fabric, get the support of a full application lifecycle that includes development, deployment, and so on.
You can develop a scalable application. For more information on this, refer to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-application-lifecycle.
You can develop highly reliable, stateless, and stateful microservices.
There are different service fabric programming models available that are beyond the scope of this chapter. For more information, refer to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-choose-framework.
The aim of this section was to give an overview of Azure Service Fabric followed by stateless microservices. We have seen that Azure Service Fabric supports in developing scalable applications.