Over the last few years, Docker and software container systems have become the industry standard for packaging and deploying applications. A consequence of this trend has been the development of container orchestration systems like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos. Microsoft Azure has entered the space with its own comprehensive system orchestration and management system, Azure Service Fabric.
What exactly is the value-add for Service Fabric? How do we use it to solve container-related technical challenges? This course answers both of those questions and goes even further by covering a number of relevant software design concepts. From this course, you will learn what Service Fabric does, how to use it to deploy a real application, and how Service Fabric incorporates design patterns and structures such as the actor model and collections.
By the end of the course, you should be ready to work with a team using Azure Service Fabric to create a working application.
Learning Objectives
- Use Azure Service Fabric to solve infrastructure orchestration challenges
- Learn about software concepts relevant to Service Fabric, including collections, the actor model, and stateful vs stateless services
- Deploy an application to a Service Fabric cluster
Intended Audience
- People looking to build applications using Microsoft Azure
- People interested in container orchestration systems
Prerequisites
- General knowledge of IT architecture
- General knowledge of software containers
Links
Congratulations! You made it! Give yourself a pat on the back, because it's been a long and tough ride. We went through a lot of pretty dense material, so before we pop the champagne bottles, let's take a minute to briefly review what we have accomplished.
By completing this course, you should now have a working knowledge of how to build a variety of applications using Azure Service Fabric. Whether they're stateless, stateful, actor-based, you should have enough knowledge so that you can get the ball rolling and create something useful. Let's take a moment to review the course objectives.
So the first one is that the student will become an expert in using Azure Service Fabric. I'm confident that section one should've accomplished most of this, as well as the demo in section three. We went over the feature set in detail and we actually went through a practical example.
Now, learning objective number two, the student will gain a theoretical understanding of collections, stateless and stateful services, and the actor model design paradigm. This was mostly theoretical. We had lessons for each of these in section two. We briefly touched on them again in the demo section. So you should have enough to be dangerous there.
And for objective three, students will be able to deploy an application using Service Fabric. Now, if you stayed awake for section three, you should know how to do this using web portal and the Azure Cloud Shell tool.
With these learning outcomes solidified in your mind, you should now be ready to dig in and build your own applications. You should also have the conceptual foundation necessary to branch out to other infrastructure platforms, such as AWS or Google Cloud, Kubernetes. Other programming languages, too. So go you!
Now that you're done, I'd like to invite you to send any feedback you have about the course to support@cloudacademy.com. We greatly appreciate your comments, questions, and suggestions. Congratulations again on fighting through the whole course, and good luck in your future endeavors.
Jonathan Bethune is a senior technical consultant working with several companies including TopTal, BCG, and Instaclustr. He is an experienced devops specialist, data engineer, and software developer. Jonathan has spent years mastering the art of system automation with a variety of different cloud providers and tools. Before he became an engineer, Jonathan was a musician and teacher in New York City. Jonathan is based in Tokyo where he continues to work in technology and write for various publications in his free time.