CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azure-service-fabric
BrettRobi
BrettRobi

Reputation: 3931

Affecting application version history

In experimenting with a sample SF app and playing with upgrades and versioning I am noticing that it keeps a rather long history of versions. Below is a screenshot of my app in SFExplorer. Is there any way to control how much history is retained, or can I cull out versions I'll never use again.

Or should I not even be concerned with this? (even though I am!)

enter image description here

Upvotes: 2

Views: 129

Answers (1)

Vaclav Turecek
Vaclav Turecek

Reputation: 9050

What you're seeing here is application registration. Before you can create an application instance, you have to register the application type and a version. When you upgrade your application, you register a new version of the same application type. This is the PowerShell command that does it (Visual Studio uses this on your behalf when you upgrade through it):

Register-ServiceFabricApplicationType

Over time, you'll see a bunch of versions of your application registered. If you don't want them registered anymore, you can simply unregister them using the corollary command:

Unregister-ServiceFabricApplicationType -ApplicationTypeName SFDemoType -ApplicationTypeVersion 1.0.2

While we have that screenshot in front of us, here are a couple cool things about application registration:

  • You can create instances of any registered application type + version at any time with the new commands:

    New-ServiceFabricApplication -ApplicationName fabric:/SFDemo2 -ApplicationTypeName SFDemoType -ApplicationTypeVersion 1.0.7

    This means you can do cool things like create side-by-side instances of the same application type but of different versions. Say you want to test out a new version of an application without upgrading an existing instance yet. You can register the new version, but instead of upgrading an existing instance of that application type, you can simply create a new instances of the new version of the application type.

  • You can "upgrade" a running application instance from any version of an application type to any other version of an application type using the upgrade command:

    Start-ServiceFabricApplicationUpgrade -ApplicationName fabric:/SFDemo -ApplicationTypeVersion 1.0.20 -FailureAction Rollback -Monitored

    For example, say you just upgraded your application instance from 1.0.15 to 1.0.20. After a while, you find a bug in 1.0.20. You can use the same application upgrade command to "upgrade" back to 1.0.15. In fact, the version strings are just strings - they can be anything you want. You can upgrade from version "banana" to version "Tuesday" if you want!

So yeah, you can unregister old versions if you think you'll never need them again. But it's great to have a version history, because you can actually do interesting stuff with it!

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions