Microsoft readies public preview of its Service Fabric microservices platform on Linux
Microsoft will make the preview of its Service Fabric microservices platform available to Linux users on September 26, the opening day of its Ignite conference in Atlanta.
Using Service Fabric, cloud applications can be decomposed into smaller components, aka microservices, that can be updated and maintained independently of the underlying infrastructure and of each other. Service Fabric enables the various microservices to communicate with one another via programming interfaces.
Microsoft announced in Build last March a limited preview of Service Fabric for Linux. That version runs on Linux hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud. The coming public preview of Service Fabric for Linux also is for the public cloud.
A version of Service Fabric for Linux that can be used on-premises and in multi-cloud environments is coming "in the near future", according to a Microsoft September 13 blog post.
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The public preview of Service Fabric for Linux will be available for download through the Azure portal. Officials are not saying when Microsoft is planning to make the Azure or on-premises Windows Server versions of Service Fabric generally available.
Update (September 30): Microsoft announced availability of the on-premises verion of Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server on September 26.
Service Fabric, originally known as Windows Fabric, is Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) 2.0 play.
Microsoft has used the Service Fabric technology to run pieces of the Azure core, as well as services including Skype for Business (Lync) and the Azure SQL Database. Microsoft officials said Tuesday that the company also has used Service Fabric in building/deploying Intune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, and Cortana.
Given that one in three virtual machines running on Azure are Linux, rather than Windows Server, Microsoft's move to bring its microservices platform to Linux make sense.