Rediscovering Azure Service Fabric - 2017

The Azure Service Fabric is spot on! It breaks down scale and development barriers like no other. For me, the Azure Service Fabric addresses increasingly complex cloud footprints needed to stand up cloud based business solutions. Instead of pushing the technology further from the businesses that use it, Azure Service Fabric brings it closer.

Addressing Scale -- For a solution to be resilient, scalable and secure, many boxes (physical or VMs) were needed to house different roles and load profiles. Architects had to anticipate workloads, balance capacity and script endlessly to ensure no bottle-necks manifest at different load levels. All that goes out the door when marketing launches something viral. While standing up a new VM in the cloud is much easier than pulling old-school boxes from the basement, it is still labor intensive. Azure Service Fabric seems to abstract all that away, freeing precious human cycles on solve real business issues or watch Youtube. Whether in single node, five node or thousand node clusters, each node houses all the necessary functions. This makes scaling up very quick and rather painless - simply by adding more nodes. Paired with a load balancer, software defined magic go to work servicing new requests.

 Addressing Development -- Did someone say more magic? Today, "just OK" does not cut it. Your audience, and I, need to see the "wow!"

And "WOW" the Azure team delivered. This fabric has the elasticity like Window 10, able to stretch from hyper-scale data centers down to my lowly I5 notebook with a skimpy SSD. This interaction consistency is almost magical in abstracting complexity, flattening the learning curve, not to mention touching the holy grail of writing once, deploy anywhere. As I write this article, Service Fabric Local Cluster Manager sits quietly in the background serving up my mini cloud.

I am jazzed. Service Fabric has delivered on Microsoft's promise to boost productivity. Its simplicity has flattened the learning curve to a point where hobbyist like myself can translate cloud technology into useful business solutions. Most importantly, I can now work with the cloud in my car, in a parking spot, underground devoid of any signal. I can't wait to see what treasures await in my rediscovery of Azure Service Fabric.