Microsoft today removed the “preview” label from Azure Service Fabric, its service for building and running both stateful and stateless Docker-based microservices in the cloud and on-premises.
Service Fabric, which is the same service Microsoft uses to power much of the core infrastructure of Azure itself, allows developers to build highly scalable services on what is essentially the company’s next-gen Platform-as-a-Service technology.
The idea here is to allow developers to focus on their code and let Microsoft take care of the orchestration and scaling. Using Service Fabric, developers can package and deploy their code without having to worry about the underlying server architecture. During today’s keynote, Microsoft showed how Service Fabric allows the developers of Age of Ascent, a real-time multiplayer game, to scale its microservices up and down as needed.
Now that Service Fabric itself is generally available, Microsoft is also making good on its promise to offer support for both Linux and Windows servers. Both of these implementations, now in preview, will make it easier for developers to use the tool for their hybrid deployments — and developers will be able to use these runtimes on other clouds as well, including AWS.
In addition, Microsoft is also open-sourcing the programming framework of Service Fabric on Linux.
Microsoft first announced Azure Service Fabric at its last Build developer conference, so it took the company quite a while before it was ready to declare it ready for full production use, despite the fact that it’s based on the same technology the company uses internally to power certain aspects of Skype and Cortana, for example.