Microsoft Releases ‘Fabric’ That Powers Cortana

Microsoft Azure has released a Platform as a Service product called Azure Service Fabric, which provides developers with the means to build out cloud services “with a high degree of scalability and customisation”.

Revealed in a blog post by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, Service Fabric follows on from last month’s release of Azure’s Apps Service, and exposes to those who want it the fabric which powers Microsoft services such as Skype for Business and Bing Cortana.

Microservices

Russinovich said: “Service Fabric is built for “microservices,” where the functional parts that make up a service are split into small units that can be individually deployed, updated, distributed, and scaled.

“These smaller units are run in containers rather than directly on VMs. Service Fabric can handle the management and scaling of these containers, with potentially hundreds of containerised microservices running on a single VM.”

Microsoft said that Service Fabric intrinsically “understands” the available infrastructure resources and needs of applications, enabling automatically updating and self-healing behavior.

“We’re now making this battle-hardened technology available for everyone use – not a version of what we use, but the exact technology we use ourselves,” Russinovich said.

To gauge interest and to get customer feedback, Microsoft will be releasing a developer preview of Service Fabric at BUILD this year, with the product being release fully in the next version of Windows Server.

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