Azure Service Fabric Cluster on a single machine

Question

As an ISV we have an enterprise solution that extents our existing software for our big customers, they must install and configure an Azure SF Cluster on-premises or even in Azure. Our software works mostly with stateless services and only a couple statefull onces. It is also multi-tenant so we can run the software ourself in a cloud environment.

But we also have a third way of using it: We need to ship our software to non-enterprise customers that have our other software on-premises. This is an issue since Service Fabric requires multiple machines that those small customers do not have and certainly do not want to have. Sometimes they are a single user of the software and running it all on a single laptop.

I see several solutions c.q. options:

1. Rewrite the software.

Maintaining the same code base somehow, host as a windows service or something. with topshelf, which is relativly easy to host OWIN / Katana based programs.

Pros

• No Service Fabric cluster
• Easier installation, for example a windows service

Cons

• No statefull services
• Multiple visual studio solutions
• Developers have to think about way of hosting and Service Fabric being available or not
• No reliability and scalability

2. Host on a Single node cluster

Install a cluster as single node on a machine as production environment. Knowing that reliability and scalability is lost, but thatis also with option 1.

Pros

• One visual studio solution
• Only one codebase, require no modifications to the code, which is easy for developers

Cons

• Not supported by Azure Service Fabric for production
• No reliability and scalability

3. Ship a cluster inside a single docker container

I know not much about docker, but perhaps it is easy to ship a pre-configured service fabric cluster?

What do you guys (and girls) think? I would love option two or three, but some of our developers are even thinking about option 1 being the better one which I doubt.

Some related links I found:

Option 2: Azure Service Fabric Single Virtual Machine

Option 3: https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric-issues/issues/409

Answer 1

You could investigate using a single server and use that to run 3 to 5 virtual machines, and run your cluster on that. You won't have the ultimate high availability, but you can still enjoy many SF features (stateful services, rolling upgrades, replication). No need to rewrite any software.