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What is Service Fabric Mesh?

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Important

The preview of Azure Service Fabric Mesh has been retired. New deployments will no longer be permitted through the Service Fabric Mesh API. Support for existing deployments will continue through April 28, 2021.

For details, see Azure Service Fabric Mesh Preview Retirement.

This video provides a quick overview of Service Fabric Mesh.

Azure Service Fabric Mesh is a fully managed service that enables developers to deploy microservices applications without managing virtual machines, storage, or networking. Applications hosted on Service Fabric Mesh run and scale without you worrying about the infrastructure powering it. Service Fabric Mesh consists of clusters of thousands of machines. All cluster operations are hidden from the developer. Upload your code and specify resources you need, availability requirements, and resource limits. Service Fabric Mesh automatically allocates the infrastructure and handles infrastructure failures, making sure your applications are highly available. You only need to care about the health and responsiveness of your application-not the infrastructure.

Service Fabric Mesh is currently in preview. Previews are made available to you on the condition that you agree to the supplemental terms of use. Some aspects of this feature may change prior to general availability (GA).

This article provides an overview of the key benefits of Service Fabric Mesh.

Great developer experience

Service Fabric Mesh supports any programming language or framework that can run in a container. Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code tooling support provides a powerful editing and debugging experience for .NET and .NET Core applications.

With Service Fabric Mesh you can:

  • "Lift and shift" existing applications into containers to modernize and run your current applications at scale.
  • Build and deploy new microservices applications at scale in Azure. Integrate with other Azure services or existing applications running in containers. Each microservice is part of a secure, network isolated application. The microservice has resource governance policies defined for CPU cores, memory, disk space, and more.
  • Integrate with and extend existing applications without making changes to those applications. Use your own virtual network to connect existing application to the new application.
  • Modernize your existing Cloud Services applications by migrating to Service Fabric Mesh.

Simple operational lifecycle

Easily manage running applications, monitoring applications, and debugging in production environments. This management includes application upgrades and versioning. These applications can consist of a single microservice or multiple microservices isolated within their own network. Applications run efficiently with fast deployment, placement, and failover times.

With Service Fabric Mesh you can:

  • Deploy and manage applications without having to explicitly provision and manage infrastructure. Service Fabric Mesh provisions, upgrades, patches, and maintains the underlying infrastructure for you.
  • Set up continuous integration using the integrated tooling to easily package and deploy applications.
  • Leverage all the features of Azure Resource Manager resources. Examples of these features include audit trail and Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC). All resources that you deploy to the Service Fabric Mesh service in Azure are Azure Resource Manager resources. These resources include applications, services, secrets, and so on.
  • Deploy and manage resources using the Azure portal, Resource Manager templates, or Azure CLI/PowerShell libraries.
  • Set up operational monitoring and alerting using Application Insights (or your tool of choice) to capture operational and diagnostic traces from the platform.
  • Access application diagnostics information emitted from the application model using Application Insights or your tool of choice.
  • Optimize resource usage by specifying auto-scale rules for the services in the application definition.

Mission critical platform capabilities

Service Fabric Mesh creates a collection of clusters that span Azure Availability Zones and/or geo-political regional boundaries. Service Fabric Mesh describes applications with a set of intents such as scale, hardware requirements, durability requirements, and security policies. When the application deploys, Service Fabric Mesh finds the optimal place to run it.

With Service Fabric Mesh you can:

  • Take advantage of high availability, scaling in/out, discoverability, orchestration, message routing, reliable messaging, no-downtime upgrades, security/secrets management, disaster recovery, state management, configuration management, and distributed transactions.
  • Choose between multiple application models when creating applications.
  • Use platform capabilities exposed through REST endpoints by consuming language-specific bindings generated using Swagger.
  • Deploy applications across Availability Zones and multiple regions for geo-reliability.
  • Use all the security and compliance features that Azure provides.

Next steps

It only takes a few steps to deploy a sample project with Visual Studio. For more information, see Create an ASP.NET Core website.

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