Microsoft has announced Azure Service Fabric, a new cloud platform for developers and ISVs to build scalable cloud services.
According to a blog post from Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, Azure Service Fabric has been in production for more than five years and underlies Microsoft services like Skype for Business, DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database, and Bing Cortana. The cloud development platform supports the creation of complex applications using both stateless and stateful microservices for low-latency data scaling, as well as Visual Studio tooling and command-line support for build, test and production deployment of Service Fabric applications.
Azure Service Fabric also provides distributed systems management and ALM capabilities, along with app orchestration and automation services.
(Related: The ongoing evolution of Azure)
This latest developer platform release is one of many cloud-based products and services Microsoft has rolled out in the past several months. According to Russinovich, Azure Service Fabric is designed to work in tandem with the Azure App Service PaaS to develop enterprise Web and mobile applications. Microsoft also recently announced Azure Machine Learning, a partnership with Chef to develop native enterprise automation tools for Azure, new Hyper-V Containers, and Nano Server technology as part of its ongoing partnership with Docker.
“I think the big difference here is that Microsoft is taking a page from what we’ve seen AWS and Google do over the past year: releasing to all devs the core internal services and frameworks that they use to run their own hyper-scale properties,” said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond. “Google did it with Kubernetes, and Amazon with the Amazon EC2 Container Service and their deployment frameworks. It’s a good time to be a ‘public’ cloud developer: Services like the Azure Services Framework significantly reduce the amount of core infrastructure code needed to adopt modern architectures—as long as you’re willing to commit the public cloud provider that they run on.”
A developer preview of Azure Service Fabric will be released at the BUILD developer conference next week. Microsoft plans to deliver this solution in the next version of Windows Server targeting Windows, and also plans to support Linux in the future.
