How to choose correct Service Fabric Reliability Tier?

Question

I'm reading the article on Service Fabric cluster capacity, reliability tiers, and durability tiers. The article (at this time of writing) lists the following tiers:

• Platinum - Run the System services with a target replica set count of 9
• Gold - Run the System services with a target replica set count of 7
• Silver - Run the System services with a target replica set count of 5
• Bronze - Run the System services with a target replica set count of 3

Is there any disadvantage / performance implications to using a high reliability tier (like Platinum)? I'm creating several clusters that will span at least 50-100VMs with a combination of stateless and stateful services.

Answer 1

Not really. Yes, technically the replication of changes to the system services will take longer, however in practice this has not made a significant difference in the performance of the system services. The replicas are almost always in a set of ~5 physical racks, the data is stored on local disks, so the performance tradeoff is (usually) more than worth the safety gained. YMMV of course.