Many of you have existing workloads either already running inside containers, or are moving to containers as the first step to run in the cloud. Running a traditional application inside containers is an easy first step to gain some benefits of a microservices architecture, such as improved density and easier application lifecycle management. Azure Service Fabric is Microsoft’s microservices platform and today we're excited to announce the release of Service Fabric 5.6 runtime and 2.6 SDK with orchestration of Windows Server Containers now generally available. This release comes with many features targeted towards container orchestration including a DNS service, resource governance, integration with OMS for container diagnostics, support for mounting volume drivers, and Hyper-V isolation. 

We’re also excited to announce a separate preview release of the Service Fabric runtime and SDK that contains support for Docker Compose for deploying containerized apps to Service Fabric with Visual Studio 2017 tooling integration. Visual Studio Team Services also includes support for continuous integration and deployment of these containerized applications to Service Fabric clusters using Docker Compose.

Last but not least, creating clusters in Azure has gotten easier with new Service Fabric PowerShell commands in the Azure SDK that make it easier to create secure clusters, including one node clusters for development and testing scenarios, and commands to scale clusters in and out through PowerShell. We’ve also made improvements to the Azure Portal, where it’s now easier than ever to integrate with Application Insights for diagnostics, and we’ve added a quick way to turn on the Service Fabric Reverse Proxy when setting up a new cluster.

On Linux, support for Service Fabric remains in public preview and the next release, coming soon after Microsoft Build 2017, includes the same container runtime capabilities. Service Fabric as a container orchestrator on Linux is planned to be made generally available later this year. As we look to the road ahead for Service Fabric, we have more container features coming including diagnostic enhancements, networking modes to enable you to run applications in multi-tenant environments, and preconfigured metrics on each VM for use with container resource constraints.

Containers and microservices can unlock real advantages for your applications, even with minimal code change. We look forward to hearing your feedback on Azure Service Fabric, now that it is a generally available container orchestrator for Windows Server Containers.

Our detailed release notes for this release are on the Service Fabric team blog.