Configuration per Service Fabric Instance

Question

I'm designing a service fabric stateless service, which requires configuration data for each instance. My initial thought was creating named partitions, and using PartitionInfo to get the named key, with a shared read only dictionary to load settings per instance. Problem is, now accessing this instance internally (From other services) requires a partition key. Since all partitions using this method will serve the same data internally, it doesn't matter which partition I connect to (I'd want it to be random). So, this gives me many possible ways to fix this problem:

• Accessing the partitions (in my attempt above) randomly using ServiceProxy.Create.

The following solutions that don't involve partitions:

• A configuration based per instance. This post doesn't give much help in coming up with a solution. A configuration section unique to each instance would be the most ideal solution.
• Create named instances, and use the name as the username (Basically attach a string to a non-partitioned instance)
• Get an instance by index, and use the index against a shared read-only dictionary to get the username.
• Somehow use InitializationData (See this post) to get a username string (If InitializationData can be unique per instance).

All of the above will solve my issue. Is any of these ways possible?

EDIT: An example of a service I'm trying to create:

Let's say we have a stackoverflow question service (SOQS for short). For the sake of this example, let's say that one user can be connected to stackoverflow's websocket at any one time. SOQS internal methods (Published to my service fabric) has one method: GetQuestions(). Each SOQS would need to connect to stackoverflow with a unique username/password, and as new questions are pushed through the websocket, they added to an internal list of questions. SOQS's GetQuestions() method (Called internally from my service fabric), would then give the same question list. I can then load balance by adding more instances (As long as I have more username/passwords) and the load internally to my fabric could then be distributed. I could call ServiceProxy.Create<SOQS>() to connect to a random instance to get my question list.

Answer 1

It sounds like what you are looking for to have a service type that has multiple actors with each actor having its own configuration. They wouldn't be multiple copies of the same service with unique configurations, it would be one (with replicas of course) instance of the service as a singleton, and individual actors for each instance.

As an example you could have the User Service (guessing what it is since you mention username string) read from some external storage mechanism the list of usernames and longs for instance ids for each to use for internal tracking. The service would then create an actor for each, with its own configuration information. Then the User Service would be the router for messaging to and from the individual actors.

Answer 2

I'm not entirely sure that this is what you're looking for, but one alternative might be to create an additional configuration service to provide the unique configs per instance. On startup of your stateless service, you simply request a random (or non-random) configuration object such as a json string, and bootstrap the service during initialization. That way, you don't have to mess with partitions, since each stateless instance will fire it's own Startup.cs (or equivalent).