Upcoming Breaking Change in Service Fabric 6.5

Removing node state will not be possible when the node is a seed node since Service Fabric 6.5. It will be necessary to convert the seed node into a non-seed node prior to node state removal. It is not yet known how to convert seed nodes into non-seed nodes. It will be possible to opt out of this limitation in the cluster configuration. Detailed guidance will be available when Service Fabric version 6.5 is released. Read more ›

What is Service Fabric Mesh?

Microsoft has recently introduced a Service Fabric Mesh service. It is a container orchestration service like Kubernetes. The name suggests that it has something in common with Service Fabric. When you want to migrate a classical service, you can consider Service Fabric Mesh. However, this is not true for native Service Fabric services. Service Fabric Mesh is more about tooling automation and hosting offerings than technological features. Read more ›

Visual Studio: Please Restore the MSBuild Nuget Package

I recently ran into a problem after upgrading my Visual Studio Service Fabric project from version 3.1.283 to 3.2.178. The build has been failing, and the advice in the error message was not helpful. Something in the build system was apparently changed, and the update script failed to upgrade the solution successfully. I created a new Service Fabric project and compared what was changed in the latest version. Read more ›

Memory Leaks Symptoms & Causes in Service Fabric Reliable Services

Memory leaks are hard to detect and can cause serious problems. While a single job task running for a few seconds doesn’t have to care about them, a service running 24 hours a day must be carefully tuned to successfully fulfill its job. Moreover, memory leaks don’t have to be detected straight away; they usually appear as another exception, pointing you to problems in a different area. Let’s look at one example of a memory leak and how it showed up. Read more ›

Keep Your Service Running Forever by Designing an Instant Shutdown

Over a year of designing and moving several services from Azure Cloud Service to Service Fabric taught me a few things that are important to keep in mind when creating or refactoring microservices hosted in a Service Fabric environment. Don’t forget that Service Fabric patterns are tightly coupled to .NET, which has gone through a massive paradigm shift. You must be up-to-date at least with asynchronous programming to be able to code solid services. Read more ›

Health Monitoring of the Service Fabric App Upgrade

Deploying an update of any application can be risky because new code may contain new bugs. Unit testing is an advisable method of reducing the risk. However, some mechanisms depend on workload. Some workloads can be simulated more easily than others. Service Fabric provides health monitoring after the new application version is deployed to the cluster. If the new version is not healthy, the old version is rolled back automatically. Setting up protection against failures caused by upgrades is relatively easy. Read more ›

How to Secure Service Fabric Cluster with an X.509 Certificate

You probably noticed that Service Fabric Explorer is publicly accessible and does not require any username or password. Service Fabric Explorer allows monitoring and management actions like disabling nodes or application deletion. The cluster and its management can be easily secured with an X.509 self-signed certificate. After that, the certificate is required to access Service Fabric Explorer or publish applications to the cluster. Read more ›

Azure Service Fabric & Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks have many names. In Windows, it is traditionally called Task Scheduler. In Unix-like environments, the job scheduler is called Cron daemon. Microsoft Azure contains Azure Scheduler, and Azure Web Apps have WebJobs. Service Fabric has its own mechanism called Actor Reminder. This article explains how to implement them. Multiple jobs can be encapsulated in a single assembly. Read more ›

Service Fabric Cluster Endpoints & Azure Load Balancer

Reaching external resources from a Service Fabric cluster is trivial, whereas reaching the cluster from the internet requires some configuration. The virtual machine scale set, service endpoint, and load balancer come into play. At first sight, it might seem as complicated as doing a puzzle, but understanding the mechanisms under the hood helps to realize that the whole process is easy. Read more ›

Service Fabric Hello World

Starting with a console app is simple. Writing a line of text to the console is easy, and the result is visible immediately. A similar situation is with a Universal Windows app where there is a TextBlock control. Service Fabric is not harder. The most difficult part is setting up your diagnostics because cloud services do not have any user interface. Read more ›

How to set up a Service Fabric development environment

You have to launch Visual Studio as an administrator. To do this every time automatically, pin Visual Studio to the taskbar, right-click the icon, then Visual Studio 2017 → Properties → Advanced… → and check Launch as administrator. Read more ›

Stateless, Stateful or Actor service?

Service Fabric is a distributed system platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric offers several types of nodes. How do you choose the best one for a given problem? Read more ›