When an administrator moves to the cloud, their workloads are typically migrated to containers. Other admins are already working within containers. Recently, Microsoft announced that they’re making Azure Service Fabric 5.6 runtime and 2.6 SDK with orchestration of Windows Server containers generally available.
The release to GA of Windows Server Container orchestration with Azure Service Fabric offers new features that include a DNS service, resource governance, integration with Microsoft Operations Management Suite for container diagnostics, support for mounting volume drivers, and Hyper-V isolation.
An additional update to Service Fabric runtime with its own SDK will support Docker Compose which will give admins the ability to deploy containerized apps to Service Fabric with Visual Studio 2017 tooling integration, which also includes support for continuous integration and deployment of containerized apps to Service Fabric Clusters using Docker Compose.
The Service Fabric PowerShell commands in the Azure SDK makes it easier to create secure clusters–even those single node clusters that are in a production environment. The Azure Portal integrates with Application Insights if you use it for diagnostics. The Microsoft team also made a change to add a quick way to turn on Service Fabric Reverse Proxy when setting up a new cluster.
Looking ahead, Service Fabric will offer more container features that include diagnostic enhancements, networking modes to enable you to run applications in multi-tenant environments, and preconfigured metrics on each virtual machine which are to be used with container resource constraints.
Even Linux users can get excited for this offering; Server Fabric support is in public preview and should be coming later this year.
Next up: Service Fabric 5.7, which is available in preview. Here’s what you’ll get:
- New service package activation options: Dedicated process for each replica of a service is now possible thanks to a new exclusive process activation option for service instances.
- Patch orchestration service: By downloading and deploying an app, you can now automate OS patching for all cluster nodes, supporting both Azure clusters as well as standalone ones. The nodes are rebooted if needed.
- Reliable concurrent queue: This option has finally been taken out of preview and into production. It provides a concurrent producer and consumer functionality with best-effort first in first out (FIFO) ordering.
- DNS: Containerized services can have existing DNS names, and now that DNS resolution is possible, it’s much easier to work within an application that has “lift and shift” scenarios. This DNS feature provides naming resolution for service endpoints in a cluster.
- Reverse proxy improvements: The Reverse Proxy now has HTTPS forwarding, client certificate authentication, and user-defined HTTP verbs.
- Certificate revocation list management: You now have more control over how list settings for certificate revocation and how they’re handled by the system to find the proper balance of security and availability for a cluster.
More information about this release can be found on the Service Fabric blog, and full release notes are here (DOC download).
