Carmine's Kernel

Gopal Kakivaya: The Essence of Service Fabric

I recently got the opportunity to geek out with the founder and VP of Service Fabric. It was highly educational. It's amazing how much Gopal knows and it's equally impressive that he was not at all prepared for this interview - meaning he had no idea what we were going to talk about besides Service Fabric. Many executives have handlers who require questions in advance. Not Gopal. He's actually a VP who is also a hands-on engineer and architect. Of course, I filmed it (that was the point, really) :) Enjoy!

Gopal Kakivaya is the founder and Vice President of Microsoft Azure's Hyperscale Compute team, which is the home of Service Fabric, an open source, general purpose distributed systems infrastructure and microservices platform that powers several of Azure's core services. Of course, it's not just for internal use by the likes of Cosmos DB, SQL Azure, Intune, Skype for Business, Azure VM APIs, Event Grid, and more... It's tailored specifically for general purpose use for running cloud (micro)services of any size and complexity - authored by you.

The primary goal of Service Fabric, from a developer's perspective is, as Gopal says, "to make programming in the large (planetary scale) feel like programming in the small (your dev machine)". All of the distributed computing complexity of the cloud is abstracted away and you're left to focus on what really matters to you and your business: your (micro)service(s), your scenarios, your code.

So, how does Service Fabric solve some of the key hard problems of distributed computing, even abstracting them away completely from developers? Where did Service Fabric originate and where is it heading? What's the essence of Service Fabric?

Gopal gives an introductory tour of Service Fabric's subsystem architecture. We also discuss Service Fabric's built-in fault analysis services, the importance of verifying the behavior of cloud services under faulty conditions, and the future of Service Fabric's Chaos Engineering infrastructure.

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

 

More information:

Service Fabric Overview

Service Fabric Github Repo

Core Service Fabric Subsystem Explorer

Service Fabric Controlled Chaos

 

Service Fabric Chaos Engineering Service: We want to hear from you!

Greetings fellow chaos engineers and SREs!

I am currently working on adding capabilities to Service Fabric's Chaos engineering and experimentation service and I'm looking for feedback and insights from folks who are already using Service Fabric (but, of course, if you're not, please do check out our offering!).

Service Fabric is a general purpose distributed systems infrastructure and orchestrator (VMs, containers, etc...). It powers a lot of Microsoft Azure today including services like Cosmos DB, SQL Azure, etc...

Service Fabric was originally designed for internal (to Azure) workloads, but has been in the public domain for a few years now - and just recently we open-sourced it.

Service Fabric has a built-in (first class!) chaos experimentation subsystem as part of its Fault Analysis Service. SF Chaos is geared toward injecting faults that typically happen in clustered distributed system environments that are designed for extreme availability (node failure, quorum loss, replication failure, application level start/stops, etc...).

You can experiment with Service Fabric clusters in the cloud by using a free Party Clusters service if you want to deploy your SF application to a cloud environment without having an Azure account.

I'm looking to get more information on who's using our Chaos service today (we know many services are, but we don't know who they are) in order to get your feedback and insights, which will help in furthering the capabilities of the system. Also, if you have any questions, just ask. You can always get to me by emailing ctorre at microsoft... If you didn't know Service Fabric has chaos experimentation built-in and first class, now you do :slightly_smiling_face: Please let me know if you are using it and want to chat.

Cheers and happy chaos!

...Charles

Wise words from Lenn

Lenn Pryor, the creator of Channel 9, my boss and my friend shared some wise words today in a post entitled The value of a good umbrella and an even better safety net. All I can say is that it's been an honor working on "crazy" projects dreamed up by Lenn and I look forward to many more opportunities to prove naysayers wrong. I also extend my gratitude to the senior leaders at Microsoft who encouraged us to take a chance and protected us from harm's way. Einstein said that if at first it isn't absurd, then it probably isn't a great idea. Congratulations on the success of Channel 9, Lenn.