Over the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that businesses are relying on cloud applications to fuel innovation and gain competitive advantage. Much of this pressure is falling on the shoulders of developers, who need to be able to rapidly create new, game-changing applications that have the potential to disrupt and transform entire industries. These same developers need to be able to release and update their applications more quickly so they can respond to customer feedback and have faster time to market than their business’s competitors.
A number of trends are emerging to make these possibilities a reality for developers and businesses alike – and one of these is microservice architectures that enable developers to create applications using multiple single-purpose, independently versioned services to provide a scalable way to build cloud-native applications and enable rapid innovation. Service Fabric is Microsoft’s microservices application platform that was released last year to help developers build and manage cloud-scale applications. Battle-hardened internally at Microsoft for almost a decade, Service Fabric has been powering highly scalable services like Cortana, Intune, Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, and Azure’s infrastructure. We’ve seen tremendous response from our customers and great momentum since our recent GA at Build 2016, including BMW, CareOtter, Ilyriad, Bentley Systems and Assurant.
Given its beginnings, Service Fabric supports Windows servers and .NET applications, but many enterprises today run heterogeneous workloads, including Windows and Linux servers, .Net and Java applications, and SQL and NoSQL databases. That’s why I am excited to announce today that the preview of Service Fabric for Linux will be publicly available at our Ignite conference on September 26. With today’s announcement customers can now provision Service Fabric clusters in Azure using Linux as the host operating system and deploy Java applications to Service Fabric clusters. Service Fabric on Linux will initially be available for Ubuntu, with support for RHEL coming soon.
In addition, with CLI (Command-Line Interface), Eclipse and Jenkins support, developers can use the tools they know to build and deploy on Service Fabric on Linux. Just as on Windows, developers can build and test their Service Fabric applications on Linux on a one-box setup, meaning you don’t need a cluster in Azure to build and test your Service Fabric app. Our vision is to enable developers to build Service Fabric applications on the OS of their choice and run them wherever they want. In the near future, we will release a Linux standalone installer to enable Service Fabric to be used outside of Azure for on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. We also plan on open sourcing parts of the platform, beginning with Service Fabric’s programming models. This will allow developers to enhance the standard programming models and use them as starting points to create their own programming models and to support other languages.
We’re excited that with our ongoing enhancements of Service Fabric’s capabilities and reach, more businesses will be able to take advantage of our innovations to power their own applications. To learn more about how to get started with Service Fabric on Linux, check out our episode on Channel 9.