Introduction
Computer systems are more distributed than ever. Containerized applications make it easy to package and deploy an application to any environment. Container orchestrators permit flexible scaling of containerized applications. Microservice architecture allows applications to be loosely coupled, reducing their dependencies. Cloud infrastructure creates entire platforms that are no longer hosted on-premises. All of these factors combine to yield a highly distributed computing environment.
As exciting as the increasingly distributed computing world is, it presents some challenges. With infrastructure and applications so spread out, how are issues of security handled? Does networking become more complicated? How can you ensure your resources are load-balanced? Does it become harder to manage the entirety of an application's lifecycle?
Suppose you work at a construction company that's looking to upgrade its on-site infrastructure to increase worker safety, efficiency, and productivity. You want to use a network of sensors to monitor conditions at the worksite and give builders access to that data so they understand their environment. You plan to use virtual machines to host your sensors. You need a platform that allows you host a network of virtual machines, and you need to be able to develop and deploy a mix of stateful and stateless microservices to your devices to collect and process telemetry from the sensors. To ensure the builders get accurate information, you want your services to be able to perform near real-time data analytics. You want event processing to send alerts to your workers. On top of this, you want to be able to scale these resources in or out depending on the size of the construction project. The unique architecture of Azure Service Fabric allows you to do all of this and more.
You'll see how Azure Service Fabric makes it simple to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers across a cluster of network-connected devices. The goal is to help you decide if Service Fabric is a good choice distributed systems platform for your business.
Learning objectives
In this module, you will:
- Learn how the features of Service Fabric simplify the challenges of building distributed systems.
- Evaluate whether Service Fabric is an appropriate distributed systems platform for you.
Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of containers and container orchestration
- A basic understanding of microservices
- A basic understanding of stateful and stateless services