On Azure Currently I use "Cloud Service" to build salable apps. "Azure Service Fabric" looks like latest method of building apps on cloud. It is very good, however I am unable to create it with single virtual machine. It shows minimum of 5 VM's per type. Since I am creating a startup app, I am unable to use 5 VMs. Is it ok to use to "Cloud Service" then? I worried it is marked as "Classic" in new portal.
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2 Answers
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Service Fabric uses a cluster of nodes - that's fundamental to how it works. It uses the nodes to ensure reliability, scalability, etc.
If you just want to play around with and don't want to pay for the VMs you have 3 options:
- Install the Service Fabric SDK on your machine
- Install the Service Fabric SDK on a VM on Azure
- Use the Service Fabric Party Clusters - http://tryazureservicefabric.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com/
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The main benefits of a service fabric application are reliability, scalability, and low latency. By placing your application on a single VM, you would be reducing the reliability significantly. I believe that is why the minimum cluster size is 5 VMs.
However, the framework for service fabric is the same whether you are running on a local cluster or running in a distributed manner in a multi-VM cluster. When you press F5 in Visual Studio, a local "cluster" is created to simulate all 5 nodes on a single machine.
If you are trying to run your application with a minimal number of VMs (knowing you are sacrificing reliability), you could create a single VM and deploy the service fabric application locally. The VM will show up as a Classic VM, but when you are ready to commit to a cluster, the same application will easily deploy.
