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. Simply 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.
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 with 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.
Build high-availability into your application architecture by co-locating your compute, storage, networking, and data resources within a zone and replicating in other zones. Azure services that support Availability Zones fall into two categories:
Zonal services – you pin the resource to a specific zone (for example, virtual machines, managed disks, IP addresses)
Zone-redundant services – platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database).
To achieve comprehensive business continuity on Azure, build your application architecture using the combination of Availability Zones with Azure region pairs. You can synchronously replicate your applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for disaster recovery protection.
The Service Fabric team will be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) (more like “ask us anything”!) session for Service Fabric Mesh on Twitter on Tuesday, October 30thfrom 9am to 10:30am PST. Tweet to@servicefabricor @AzureSupport using #SFMeshAMA with your questions on Mesh and Service Fabric. More information here
More information about Azure Service Fabric Mesh :
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Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Service Fabric also addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud native applications. Developers and administrators can avoid complex infrastructure problems and focus on implementing mission-critical, demanding workloads that are scalable, reliable, and manageable. Service Fabric represents the next-generation platform for building and managing these enterprise-class, tier-1, cloud-scale applications running in containers.
In the following Step-by-Step Guide I created a Standalone Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Cluster
on Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview for DevOps testing :
Several sample cluster configuration files are installed with the setup package. ClusterConfig.Unsecure.DevCluster.json is the simplest cluster configuration: an unsecure, three-node cluster running on a single computer. Other config files describe single or multi-machine clusters secured with X.509 certificates or Windows security. You don’t need to modify any of the default config settings for this tutorial, but look through the config file and get familiar with the settings.
I made the Unsecure three-node Cluster running on Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview in my MVPLAB.
Open Powershell in Administrator modus and run the Script :
Service Fabric Explorer (SFX) is an open-source tool for inspecting and managing Azure Service Fabric clusters. Service Fabric Explorer is a desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux.
I Installed Azure Service Fabric Explorer to visualize the Cluster.
Here we got Azure Service Fabric 3-Node Cluster running on Windows Server 2019 Insiders
Azure Service Fabric CLI
The Azure Service Fabric command-line interface (CLI) is a command-line utility for interacting with and managing Service Fabric entities. The Service Fabric CLI can be used with either Windows or Linux clusters. The Service Fabric CLI runs on any platform where Python is supported.
Prior to installation, make sure your environment has both Python and pip installed. The CLI supports Python versions 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. Python 3.x is the recommended version, since Python 2.7 will reach end of support soon.
Check the Python version and the Pip version by typing :
python –version
Pip –version
The Pip version which is delivered via Python has to be updated with the following command :
python -m pip install –upgrade pip
We now have pip version 18.0 instead of 10.0.1
Installing Service Fabric CLI by command :
pip install -I sfctl
Done ! Service Fabric CLI is installed on my Windows 10 Surface.
sfctl -h
Now we have installed Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Cluster on Windows Server 2019 Insiders Preview and the Service Fabric CLI on Windows 10, we now can connect to the 3-node Fabric Cluster via CLI.
Because we are working under Windows 10 and not on the host itself we have to set an endpoint connection :
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise and Service Fabric SDK
As a Developer or DevOps you like to work from Microsoft Visual Studio to deploy your Apps, Microservices or Containers to the Azure Service Fabric Cluster.
You need to install the Service Fabric SDK in Visual Studio before you can deploy :
Select Service Fabric Application at New Project
Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise : Service Fabric SDK must be installed
Installing Microsoft Azure Service Fabric SDK
Done.
Now you can make your Service Fabric Container.
Happy Developing 😉
More information on Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Cluster :
Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work. Linux users can opt for a Bash experience, while Windows users can opt for PowerShell. But now with Project Monaco my favorite tool Visual Studio Code is integrated in Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell 🙂 Awesome for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) like I did with Terraform
The Azure DevOps Project automates the setup of an entire Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure. You can start with your existing code or use one of the provided sample applications, and then quickly deploy that application to various Azure services such as Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure Container Service, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Service Fabric.
The Azure DevOps project does all the work for the initial configuration of a DevOps pipeline including everything from setting up the initial Git repository, configuring the CI/CD pipeline, creating an Application Insights resource for monitoring, and providing a single view of the entire solution with the creation of an Azure DevOps Project dashboard on the Azure portal.
Learn how to use the Azure DevOps Project to create VSTS Release pipelines :
The Azure DevOps Project presents a simplified experience where you bring your existing code and Git repository, or choose from one of the sample applications to create a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure. The DevOps project automatically creates Azure resources such as a new Azure virtual machine, creates and configures a release pipeline in VSTS that includes a build definition for CI, sets up a release definition for CD, and then creates an Azure Application Insights resource for monitoring.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) gives you benefits like :
Consistency in naming conventions of Azure components
Working together in the same way with your company policies
Reusability of Templates
Automatic documentation and CMDB of deployments in your repository
Rapid deployments
Flexibility and Scalability in code for Azure Deployments
As an Large Enterprise Company you don’t want to Click and Type in the Azure Portal with lot of employees to get the job done in a consistent way. The changes and deployments will be different in time because people can make mistakes. For Developers it’s important to make your building process before you publish your application, so why not for DevOps and ITpro to do the same thing for Infrastructure.
In the following step-by-step guide you will learn how to make a Microsoft Azure DevOps Project and make a CI/CD Pipeline deploying a virtual machine with your ASP.net Application.
When you have your prerequisites in place you can start with the following steps :
Search for DevOps at All Services in the Azure Portal
Select .NET and Click on Next
You can see where you are in the flow of creating your CI/CD Pipeline, when you need a Azure SQL Database for your ASP.net application you can select Add a Database (Option). This will provide you Azure SQL as a Service (PaaS).
Database-as-a-Service
(I didn’t Choose for SQL)
In this step select Virtual Machine and click Next
From here you can create a VSTS account or your Existing account of Visual Studio Team Services. After selecting VSTS you can manage your Azure settings and by clicking on Change you can select the Azure options.
Select the Virtual Machine you need for your Application.
Here you see the Deployment Running
Important for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the Deployment template can be saved into the library and / or you can download it for reusability or make your own policies into the template.
When you save it into the Azure Library you get the release notes and who’s the publisher
In the Microsoft Azure DevOps Project main Dashboard you will see the status of your CI/CD Pipeline and that release is in progress or not. On the right-side of the Dashboard you see the Azure resources like the Application endpoint, the Virtual Machine and Application Insights for monitoring. When the CI/CD Pipeline deployment is succeeded you can browse to your ASP.net Application.
Your Application.
Your Virtual Machine Running and in the Monitoring.
The Microsoft Azure DevOps Project CI/CD Pipeline is Completed.
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use it to monitor your live web application. It will automatically detect performance anomalies. It includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It’s designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js and J2EE, hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It integrates with your DevOps process, and has connection points to a variety of development tools. It can monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile apps by integrating with Visual Studio App Center and HockeyApp.
You can drill down into the error to see what is happening.
Azure Application Insights topology
Application Insights is aimed at the development team, to help you understand how your app is performing and how it’s being used. It monitors: Request rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out which pages are most popular, at what times of day, and where your users are. See which pages perform best. If your response times and failure rates go high when there are more requests, then perhaps you have a resourcing problem. Dependency rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out whether external services are slowing you down. Exceptions – Analyse the aggregated statistics, or pick specific instances and drill into the stack trace and related requests. Both server and browser exceptions are reported. Page views and load performance – reported by your users’ browsers. AJAX calls from web pages – rates, response times, and failure rates.
User and session counts. Performance counters from your Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage. Host diagnostics from Docker or Azure. Diagnostic trace logs from your app – so that you can correlate trace events with requests. Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.
You can also drill down into Microsoft Azure Log Analytics and run your analytics queries to get the right information you want for troubleshooting. More information on Azure Log Analytics and queries is on MSFT docs.
From App Insight we see it was an Exception error
Because the Azure DevOps Project is connected with VSTS you can follow the Build and Release here to and you got your documentation of the CI/CD Pipeline.
From here you can work with your Developers and DevOps and manage the User and Groups security in de CI/CD Pipeline for the next Build. Working together to build innovative apps via VSTS from one Dashboard :
VSTS Dashboard
Next day you see it was one time error and the Pipeline is running Fine 😉
Invest in your CI/CD Pipeline and make your own environment is important before you deploy into Azure production for your business. Make your ARM Templates and Code in repositories like Git or VSTS. When you have this all in place your are more in control of your consistent Deployments and Changes in the Azure Cloud. I hope this blogpost is useful for you and your Company. Start today with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and get the benefits 😉
Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work. Linux users can opt for a Bash experience, while Windows users can opt for PowerShell
