Many customers are using Azure Service Fabric to build and operate always-on, highly scalable, microservice applications. Recently, we open sourced Service Fabric with the MIT license to increase opportunities for customers to participate in the development and direction of the product. Today, we are excited to announce the release of Service Fabric runtime v6.2 and corresponding SDK and tooling updates.
This release includes:
- The general availability of Java and .NET Core Reliable Services and Actors on Linux
- Public preview of Red Hat Enterprise clusters
- Enhanced container support
- Improved monitoring and backup/restore capabilities
The updates will be available in all regions over the next few days and details can be found in the release notes.
Reliable Services and Reliable Actors on Linux is generally available
Reliable Services and Reliable Actors are programming models to help developers build stateless and stateful microservices for new applications and for adding new microservices to existing applications. Now you can use your preferred language to build Reliable Services and Actors with the Service Fabric API using .NET Core 2.0 and Java 8 SDKs on Linux.
You can learn more about this capability through Java Quickstarts and .NET Core Samples.
Red Hat Enterprise clusters in public preview
Azure Service Fabric clusters running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is now in public preview. Using the Azure portal or CLI, you can now create and deploy Service Fabric clusters on RHEL, a capability that was previously available only for Windows and Ubuntu platforms.
Learn how to set up Red Hat Enterprise Linux based Linux machine for Service Fabric application development.
Enhanced container support
To make it easier for you to deploy and run container-based apps and services on Service Fabric, we've added several features:
- You can now auto scale services and container instances in your Service Fabric cluster based on resource consumption metrics that you define. Service Fabric will monitor the load on a service and will dynamically scale in or out. For example, you can set memory thresholds to automatically scale your service by defined increments.
- Building on the container log views from the v6.1 release, Service Fabric Explorer (SFX) now shows more descriptive error messages to help you quickly identify and resolve container issues such as the inability to find an image, or if the image fails to start.
- Support for queries using the Docker APIs provides more insights into your containers.
- Specify custom parameters that will be used when Service Fabric launches the Docker daemon.
- With Visual Studio 2017 3.1 (preview), more container tooling and debugging support is now available for Service Fabric as well.
To learn more about container support in Azure Service Fabric, please visit the Service Fabric and containers documentation.
Improvements to monitoring, backup, and restore
The Application Insights SDK for Service Fabric now supports remoting V2 in public preview. More Service Fabric events are also available via the operational channel for you to track important cluster operations. Furthermore, you can now directly query the cluster to monitor any changes in your cluster through the public preview of EventStore APIs. EventStore APIs can be used to monitor workloads in test or staging clusters, and for on-demand diagnostics of production clusters. Finally, with the public preview of the Backup and Restore service for Windows, you can now easily backup and restore data in your Reliable Stateful or Reliable Actor services.
To learn more about the comprehensive set of improvements made to the platform with this release, please refer to the Azure Service Fabric 6.2 release notes.