Unit testing in Azure Service Fabric

Unit testing in Service Fabric can be difficult. For example, how can you test remoting communication between services? And how do you even create an instance of your service type, without relying on a Service Fabric cluster being present on the machine? Fortunately, there’s help available.

In this article you’ll find a description of some of the solutions provided by the open source library named ‘ServiceFabric.Mocks’.

Please note that all examples below are also available as unit tests on Github.

Running Windows Containers on Azure Service Fabric

Background

Since the release of Service Fabric runtime version 5.4.145, Microsoft added a (preview) feature to run Windows Containers on Windows Server 2016. The Linux version already supported this for a while. This post explains why Containers are useful and how to get it to work.

Container Lake

Running containers at scale is hard, it requires an orchestrator which you need to manage, and often it requires (virtual) machines that also need to be maintained. I believe that this is an intermediate step that will soon become obsolete. In the future you’ll run your software in a “Container Lake”, by simply pushing your code into the cloud. All the messy stuff currently required; compile code, create and publish a container image and deploying it to some orchestrator will vanish. This will allow you to focus on adding business value, using the development technology of your choice.

Combining Azure Service Fabric and Service Bus

To integrate Service Fabric into an existing application landscape, it often makes sense to introduce a queuing mechanism.

For example, it could make sense to have a back-office shipping system notify services running in Service Fabric about completed shipments.

Using a reliable queue effectively decouples the two systems. It allows for downtime in either system, without negatively affecting the other. Obviously, the queue system itself needs to be rock solid, fortunately such systems are readily available. One option is to use Azure Service Bus.

You can find all sources here.

Running a DevOps style production Docker cluster using the Microsoft platform.

Recently, me and my Xpirit colleague Alex Thissen gave a 30 minute talk on DevOps on the Container Days in Hamburg. We had a lot of fun doing it!

Getting your .NET Core application to run in a Docker cluster is only the beginning of a journey. It takes more to build and run your application in Azure using DevOps practices. In this session we will show you how we created a mission critical .NET Core application in a Kubernetes cluster in Azure using Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Team Services. You will learn how to design your .NET application architecture to run on Azure, which software patterns to implement for environment flexibility, how to build Continuous Integration and Deployment pipelines for zero-downtime, provision your Infrastructure declaratively using ARM templates and what to do to integrate metrics and instrumentation in your application for real-time monitoring. We will share our lessons learned, so you can get a jump-start running your own application in a similar way using the Microsoft Platform.

Here’s a link to the video.

TechDays 2017 Talk – slides

Here is the slide-deck of my talk ‘Building high quality services using Service Fabric’, at TechDays 2017.

The talk featured data partitioning strategies (for Stateful services) and writing your service code in such a way, that it can be unit tested.

If you were there, thank you for attending. If not, I’ll put a link to the video on Channel9 here, once it’s available.

Building high quality services using Azure Service Fabric

And here’s the video too:

Talking to Kubernetes from VSTS

After you have created a Kubernetes cluster, for instance, by using Azure Container Service, you probably want to start running some containers on it. In this post, I will describe how to do this, by using VSTS. I’ll explain how to execute commands and queries on Kubernetes, by using the CLI and by using Tasks.

Creating and restoring backups in ASF Reliable Stateful Services.

Creating and restoring backups of Azure Service Fabric Stateful Service replicas can be challenging. In this article I’ll describe how you can use my Nuget package “ServiceFabric.BackupRestore” (or its source code) that will help make this much simpler.

ServiceFabric.BackupRestore

ServiceFabric.BackupRestore simplifies creating and restoring backups for Reliable Stateful Service replicas. It supports both Full and Incremental backups.