Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server has been made available by Microsoft. The company says the service can now be downloaded and is free for Azure customers. This is a move to general availability, which moves Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server out of preview. Incidentally, earlier in the month Microsoft announced the service was available on Linux in preview.
The release of Service Fabric for Windows Server means organizations can provision cluster within their own data centers. Microsoft has been bolstering its services to give developers abilities to create Service Fabric apps on any platform.
Microsoft made Azure Service Fabric generally available back at Build 2016 in March. At that announcement, the company also confirmed the preview for Windows Server. This release for Windows Server brings the benefits of the service to more customers through GA.
In its blog post, Microsoft discusses some of the benefits of using Service Fabric:
- Using data center resources you already own and developing microservice architectures on premise before moving to the cloud.
- You can choose to create clusters on other cloud providers.
- Service Fabric applications, can be deployed to any cluster with minimal to no changes. This can provider an added layer of reliability because you can move your applications to another deployment environment
- Developer knowledge of building Service Fabric applications and the operational experience of running and managing Service Fabric clusters carries over from one hosting environment to another.
Azure Service Fabric
Microsoft uses Service Fabric for its own services. Indeed, it is the very foundation for numerous Microsoft products, such as Cortana, Skype for Business, Azure SQL Databased, Event Hubs, and myriad other services.
It is a distributed systems platform for developers to deploy and manage scalable micro-services. Service Fabric helps create Tier 1 cloud-scale enterprise applications. It helps removed complicated infrastructure so dev’s can create reliable apps and services.