What is Windows Fabric and how to host services in it?

Question

I recently installed Windows Server Service Bus 1.0 (on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine).

That also installs "Windows Fabric" (not AppFabric).

Could not find much information on it, and googleing it I stumbled on a Lync server post (Windows Fabric is also installed by Lync Server 2013).

Definition:

"Windows Fabric is a Microsoft technology used for creating highly reliable, distributable, and scalable applications."

From the Service Bus architecture intro,it looks like Fabric is what allows for services replication, high availabilty, and fault tolerance.

Anyone knows if that can be used to host custom .NET services? Or any kind of direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Cos

Answer 1

I went to a talk by Mark Eisenberg on May 28th at the Microsoft NERD Center near MIT in Boston MA. The talk was mostly about the Azure Service Fabric. General consensus was that if you're using Azure from the infrastructure as a service perspective you aren't really using it.

The next step up is to use Azure naively as a platform meaning that rather than create VMs and hosting them there you're creating cloud services and web jobs and web apps and using the new Logic Api's etc...

But if you really want to build a stateful, resilient service enterprise class you'll want to go underneath the PaaS and write against the Service Fabric directly for greater control.

That's where the money is.

I did a write up on the talk and what the Azure Service Fabric is a few days ago and posted it here.

Answer 2

Windows Fabric is used internal by Microsoft to building highly available, resilient and scalable services. It has been used for Service Bus, SQL Database, Document DB etc. according to this video: Building Resilient, Scalable Services with Microsoft Azure Service Fabric

Until now it has not been available for external parties but has now been announced as Service Fabric which will be available on Windows Azure and Window Server 2016.

Read more here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/service-fabric/

Answer 3

Fabric which the name suggests in itself, is back-end. It is no different than iSCSI or EIGRP. The main difference is that it is generic in form rather than specific like the aforementioned services/protocols.

IIS is a server service specific to web hosting. SQL the same but database only..

fabric, applied to host fabric aware services and software.

Answer 4

I don't actually think that Windows Fabric is open product. It is used for infrastructure purposes, and not for deploying custom services. For your custom services you have to use platform built on top of Windows Fabric, like Service Bus, Windows Server App Fabric. I think Windows Fabric is for internal use by Windows Azure and Private Cloud for clustering, load balancing and so on.

UPDATE: I've started developing Windows Azure application and here is what I've found. I've added a Service role to Azure application and started it on local development machine (under Azure emulator). And my service was published in and started under Windows Fabric!

So the conclusion is: Windows Fabric is a platform for running YOUR Cloud Services.