What is Microsoft Azure Service Fabric, and Why is it Such a Game-Changer?

You might have heard that we’re moving our infrastructure over to Microsoft Azure Service Fabric, but maybe you haven’t been too sure what this means for you. Here’s a quick overview to help you understand the change and its benefits.

Azure Service Fabric is a Platform-as-a-Service, a distributed systems platform that, now open source, provides access to the same massive scale tools that Microsoft itself uses every day to build, run, and manage many of their services. It is built to enable enterprises to create and manage scalable reliable services and container-based solutions, as well as to benefit from cloud native applications.

Why the Change?

Traditionally, companies used monolithic apps, which coupled all functionality or features of an application into one service. Any updates or changes however small resulted in downtime or hardware unavailability. Scaling was a costly enterprise, and was slow to manage, as all parts of a system scaled at the same rate even when use was uneven.

With the widespread adoption of the cloud, our IT environments have become more complex, and speed, agility and uptime are more integral than ever. The development environment has shifted to make this easier, by offering microservices – loosely coupled services that can be scaled, improved, and changed without affecting the rest of the cluster. The management, reliability, and security of these is where Service Fabric takes the stage.

How Does This Affect Atera?

With Microsoft services at the helm managing the inter-service communication between these components and the behind the scenes admin, our developers are freed up to focus on the important stuff. They can run any application code or use built-in programming models. The creation of containers, cloud objects, and applications, as well as traditional stateless and cutting-edge stateful microservices is simplified, making development more efficient and reliable than ever before.

They can write once, and then deploy anywhere – on Azure, on premises, and on Windows and Linux, too. Rather than get caught up in complex architecture challenges, they can focus on making Atera better for our customers, driving business value and agility.

How Does This Affect our Customers?

Positively! By moving over to Service Fabric:

• Our customers get new features faster, driving better business results and achieving a competitive edge.
• Rolling upgrades means you get zero application downtime. Even if something goes wrong, applications simply roll back to the previous version.
• Scaling is effortless with dynamic resource balancing and data partitioning. As our users increase, our resources will increase right alongside.
• We have detailed diagnostics and discovery when something isn’t right.

We’re so excited to start sharing the benefits of the infrastructure move with our customers, offering seamless scalability, faster features and more reliability. As always, if you have any questions about this or any of our latest updates, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us via [email protected].

Speaking of Azure, did you know that Atera has an Azure integration?

Import and Update Contacts Directly From Azure Active Directory

Are you looking for tips for Azure Cloud Management success? Then check out this blog we wrote, just for you – you’re welcome!